


take me away from here (i'm feeling this)

by edgeoftown



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - 2000s, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - No Pennywise (IT), Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Road Trips, Slow Burn, Underage Drinking, even if i dont reinforce it all the time, just know everyones outfits and hair r genuinely tragic not just fun tragic, nothing more than the average college freshman dont worry!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:00:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22306828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edgeoftown/pseuds/edgeoftown
Summary: Richie hates to admit it, but the second he gets to his dorm he logs into his MySpace and finds Eddie the prep's profile. Whatever Richie did last weekend bothered him so bad he had to post about it and, well. Richie just has to know.He pauses the profile song immediately because Eddie hasn’t coded it hidden (like Richie has). His Top 8 is mostly his friends, at number one is ~*MyraTiara*~. Two through five are some mirror selfies of people Richie doesn't recognize.And then, of course, there they are, at number six. Maroon 5. Seriously, who is this guy?or: the Losers go to university in 2006 and also it’s loosely based off Road Trip.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 41
Kudos: 143





	1. the needle on my record player has been wearing thin

Richie meets Eddie the first week of freshman year, at some party that Ben invited them to. 

Ben was on the UCLA football team — on a partial scholarship thankyouverymuch — after his pre-sophomore-year of high school growth spurt had put him near Richie’s sky high territory and right into the eye line of the football coach. By senior year he’d been one of the best players in school, through that Ben brand of determination where you wouldn’t even notice how hard he was working at something, until suddenly he was a professional at it.

So naturally, as a coach endorsed team building exercise, a bunch of the team who lived together were throwing a party, and had told Ben to come, and to _bring whoever man it’s gonna be a fuckin rager. No prudes though! Haha!_ Richie wonders how disappointed the jocks are gonna be when they see Stan, Bev and himself.

Bev as always, takes far too long to chose an outfit, switching between her usual floor length Tripp skirt, printed tank top combo, and some low waisted bootlegs and a light blue zip up (borrowed from her roommate). The second choice is very un-her, but she says she’s toying with the idea of fitting in, just to see what it’s like. It freaks all of them out and makes her uncomfortable anyway, so in the end she settles on some cargo pants with Richie’s chain wallet clipped to the belt loop because “it looks better on me anyway,” and she cuts the bottom couple inches off a tank top thirty seconds before they leave her dorm. Her hair ends up in a couple little spiky pig tails, like somewhere in-between weirdo mall goth and cool girl. 

They pre on the way there, drinking tequila out of Bev’s half full flask, but it’s barely enough to get the group of them tipsy. Thank god they brought the beers Stan (perpetually stern faced and adult-like) had managed to fool the liquor store man into selling him while Ben (perpetually baby faced) had waited outside. 

It’s before midnight, and the party’s still picking up steam. There’s only a couple people dancing in the living room (timidly) but there is a raucous game of flip cup going on in the kitchen, with lots of beer on the floor already. Some people are already mentioning keg stands but only in future tense. Sure, once more people show up he’s gonna fuckin do it bro but what’s the point now? Kasey’s not even gonna see it Bro, and he’s trynna tap that ass dude, you know?

Richie knows within seconds that he’s gonna end up in one of these bedrooms smoking weed out of a strangers bong, and he’ll real casual put on some Taking Back Sunday (here’s hoping someone has a speaker that’ll plug into his Zune). Until then though, there are two beers to drink and maybe even some dancing with Ben and Bev to be done. 

He shotguns the first of his two allotted cans, and everyone yells at him for being stupid and gross when half of it ends up on his band tee and checkered Vans. 

He throws up both middle fingers, still holding the can in one hand, yelling, _Whatever! Beer’s disgusting and I’m trying to get fuckin faced tonight!_ a bit too loud for the current state of the party and someone turns up Temperature to drown him out. Stan rolls his eyes through a small smile and starts drinking his own beer in earnest, as if that’ll make a drunk Richie more bearable, and Bev’s grabbing his hand and tugging him to the living room. She’d gotten obsessed with learning the lyrics to this song and knew literally all of it by heart, which was honestly really impressive. 

They dance stupid and crazy in the centre of the living room, jumping around and yelling and grabbing on to each other for balance as if they’d been drinking for hours and not half of one, right through Temperature, into Crazy by Gnarles Barkley (who’s name is so fucking cool is should just be part of the song name), and Dirty Little Secret (even though Richie honestly kind of thinks they’re posers), but then someone puts on Maroon 5 and that’s where Richie draws the fucking line. He pushes over to the table in the corner housing the huge speakers and someone’s laptop plugged into them (brave? stupid? up to you) and before anyone can see him and ask what he’s doing, he’s changed it to HOLLERTILYOUPASSOUT, absolutely delighting in the groan that goes through the room.

Even more when some 5’6” prep rushes up to him and pushes his shoulder.

“What the fuck man? I just put on that song!”

“It was Maroon 5. No one wants to listen to that shit.” Richie smiles, all teeth. He swears he can already see steam coming out of this guys ears.

“No one wants to listen to this either what the fuck is- like it’s so bad it’s not even fucking- It’s not music! It’s just noise!” He’s a sputtering animated sort of angry, waving his arms and his drink sloshes out of the red solo cup a little. Richie might be a little in love already. “And Maroon 5 is one of the best bands on the radio right now I don’t care what you say.” 

Actually, love might be too strong a word to use on someone who likes Maroon fucking 5.

“Baby, please, 3OH!3,” he does the symbol with his hands here, just to see how the guy reacts, “are lyrical geniuses. Musical prodigies. Fucking, sex gods, man. They’re actually better than The Beatles.”

The prep stops in his track like someone’s hit pause on him. He presses his fingers to his temple, staring somewhere just past Richie’s shoulders. He processes the cold hard facts Richie’s just presented for a solid five seconds, then brings his hand down from his face so violently that Richie flinches, and then laughs at himself for being afraid of the world’s smallest man. This only infuriates him more.

“First of all, asshole, that’s just so not true that there’s no way even _you_ actually believe that, second you’re probably losing your hearing from all the screamo shit I’m sure you listen to,” he gestures towards Richie’s very skinny women’s jeans and beat up vans as he says this, “not to mention braincells, if you think this is better than— if you think this is good, full stop.”He shakes his head and takes another sip from his drink like, _I’m done with this_. He can pretend DON’TTRUSTME wasn’t the best pop song of the decade all he wants but Richie knows even this prep would’ve screamed along to that. He is… endlessly frustrated. Also, sort of turned on? Any attention is good attention, apparently. 

“Listen cutie, you can shit on them all you want but you know at the end of the day 3OH!3 gets people in the moooood.” Hook.

“Really? Anyone who gets _in the mood_ to this shit has to be like riddled with STDs and brain tumours.” Line.

“Hey man, hey man, that’s not nice.” The boy raises his eyebrows at him. “Don’t talk about your mom like that.” Sinker.

His eyes widen and his face reddens incredibly, if it gets any hotter the tips of his popped collar will catch fire. He clenches his fist around his cup and it crunches loudly, more drink sloshing out over his fist. He stares at Richie incredulously for only a second before Richie loses it, doubling over in laughter. He hears a muttered _you’re so fucking disgusting_ and then he’s storming off. Richie can’t stop laughing.

Bev comes over then, she’d probably ignored the whole thing, or most of it at least. He throws an arm over her shoulder, says,

“Beverly, that is without a doubt the most annoying man I’ve ever met,” she tilts her head a bit like _you’re one to talk_ , “and I promise you within a month I’m going to fuck him. Or kill him.”

Bev nods sagely. “Those are the only two kinds of relationships yeah.” And Richie chugs the rest of his second allotted beer, then puts it down on the arm of the couch.

“Right you are. Let’s go find some weed.” Luckily his friends are more than happy to follow

They do find a room with a half assembled circle of people spread out across the bed and floor, a couple making out heavy in the blue beanbag chair. They don’t know any of them but they’re all too stoned to care about that, only that they close the door faster _we’re hot boxing it man._ They spread out, Ben pulls out some of his weed (the only one of them who ever actually buys it instead of bumming off others like a heathen) and they load up the bong that’s passed to them, and Richie’s had a bit to drink already so after two pretty hefty bowls things get blurry. Like the, _he closes the door to the washroom he just used and actually he’s suddenly not sure if it was a washroom or a closet because it didn’t even occur to him to turn on the light_ kind of blurry.

They leave before it gets too pathetic to stay any longer, Stan ushering them out because they’ve done the sleeping on strangers’ floors thing enough times, and he knows Bev will want to take her make up off before bed, and Ben will want to put on a movie that he’ll pass out exactly seven minutes into. 

Richie sees the prep from earlier, still nameless, on the other end of the front lawn standing just to the side of a gaggle of other clean pressed straight, edge looking assholes. He can’t resist.

“Hey, Maroon Five!” Unbelievably, he looks over. Like, who answers to Hey Maroon Five! who is this guy? “Have a good night cutie! Give your mom my love!”

“Sick your mom joke, asshole, call me when you come up with something that’s actually funny!” He turns to leave and then seems to think better of it and turns back lightning quick, “Actually no, don’t call me, don’t ever talk to me again.” 

Richie smiles. “Not a chance my love!” He waves at him like a bride waving her husband off to war from a train platform. God, truly, there is nothing quite like being a complete nuisance. 

He pukes in a bush on a quiet street a block away, and then blacks out fully. 

* * *

During the second week of school Richie finds a flyer for the university’s radio station. It’s like destiny — he’s leaning against the side of the building having a post class smoke, and when he goes to step on the butt of the cigarette there it is, light yellow paper with grainy graphic block text reading _UCLA Radio! It’s all jamz!_ which is a kind of fucking stupid headline but also. He’d be so good on the radio.

He goes down to the building marked on the flyer that very day, and he’s obviously not the only person trying to intern there, so they put him on the waiting list and tell him they’ll let him know when to come back to do an “informal” interview and figure out his schedule. He’s so fucking stoked. The room’s lined in vinyls and CDs and the radio host who was DJing when he was there was playing Bowling For Soup. 

He tracks Bev down after that, immediately, and finds her half asleep at a picnic bench in the courtyard, half empty blue monster at her elbow, one headphone in. He clicks the centre button on her iPod nano (an incredibly expensive gift from her aunt for getting into university) and pauses Copeland. She’ll be a little pissed — and he’s right, she cuts him a glare to kill — but he can’t be bothered with that right now. 

“No, I know, but I’m not actually sorry cause check this shit out!” He thrusts the slightly crumpled and sweaty radio flyer to her. She scans the page but doesn’t move to grab it.

“That’s cool. Did you apply?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

“Mm.”

“Okay please finish your monster so you can become a human and then be excited for me, your best friend, the light of your life, fire of your loins, or whatever it is they talk about in your vampire books.” She’s reading something called Twilight, and when he pestered her about she got all flustered and twitchy so he’s decided it's vampire porn.

“There’s no loins.” But she obliges and chugs the rest of the monster in one go. Sugar rush, oh boy. “Did you hear you’re being posted about on MySpace?”

“Oooooh what is it does someone have a crush on me? Did my nudes leak? Did I get Paris Hiltoned?”

“As if Trashmouth, it’s some dude you got into a fight with last weekend at that party. The one Ben took us to? I don’t know.” 

“Sort of.” Of course he remembers… now that someone’s told him about it. Definitely he woke up the morning after completely lucid with a picture perfect memory of the previous night. Definitely. “What can I say though, I’m unforgettable. I’m not surprised he’s still talking about me.”

“No, not like right now he posted it last weekend, I only just heard about it though. Sarah from my screen printing workshop asked me if I knew you.”

“Amazing. What’d he say?”

“Uh, something about like, stupid hair and like entitled Californians or something? I’m not sure.” She grabs his backpack and pulls out his laptop, “think we can get on the library wifi from out here?”

“Absolutely not, but let’s try.” 

They wait the full eight minutes it takes for his shitty Dell to boot up, and then they can’t even get on the library wifi from outside, no matter how close they get to it. Of course.

* * *

Richie hates to admit it, but the second he gets to his dorm he logs into his MySpace and clicks through to the tab he has open with Eddie’s MySpace name typed into the search bar and a 404 error on the screen, and hits refresh to load it for real. He’s got the classic MySpace blue and orange, but his background’s a repeating mirror selfie of him and a brunette with some truly tragic highlights. It’s all pretty basic, and Richie hadn’t expected much else from this dude really. No flair.

Richie pauses his profile song immediately, because he hasn’t coded it hidden (like Richie has), thank god. His Top 8 are mostly his friends, at number 1 is ~*MyraTiara*~ but when he clicks through to her profile all it does is prove that she is in fact the girl tiled nauseatingly across his whole profile and that she lives in Ithaca. Anyone under number one doesn't seem important enough to check, and anyway he doesn't recognize any of their mirror selfie profile pics. Different circles. 

And then of course, Maroon 5, right there, nestled in at number six. Sucks for the two people under them.

He scrolls through his blog to try and find what he wrote about Richie. His first blog post is just about the things that pissed him off this week it looks like, which is hilarious. Apparently he hates slow walkers, and the coffee at the Kerckhoff Coffee House (kind of fair), and loud parties in his res hall, and getting his shoes dirty (if they’re boat shoes Richie’s gonna scream). He’s filled out an obnoxiously long survey too, with absolutely no hot or spicy questions, as far as Richie can tell, though he scrolls through it pretty fast.

1\. Last beverage:

water

2\. Last phone call:

myra <3 

3\. Last song you listened to:

fireflies - owlcity

11\. Kissed anyone on your friends list:

just Myra <3333

13\. Do you want any pets:

im allergic

18\. What did you do for your last birthday:

dinner and a movie (The Holiday) with Myra <3 love u baby

25\. What time did you wake up today:

7:30am ughhhh

36\. Nicknames?

Eddie’s already a nickname it doesn’t need to be shorter?!?!?

66\. Relationship status:

taken and happy!! <33 Myra <33

70\. Height:

5’ 8”

76\. Do you have a crush on someone???

the one and only ~*MyraTiara*~

Oh, he’s like, one of _those_ boyfriends. Lame. But after the hundred most boring questions in the world? Jackpot. The blog post about Richie himself. Oh god, suddenly Richie wishes he’d sent it out as a bulletin, but this will do.

_Sunday, September 10, 2006_

_Ugh!!!!!_

_It’s so fucking stupid to think you’re “superior"or some shit because of whatever music you listen to.. especially if it objectively sounds like nails on a chalkboard UGH! Like ooooh okay we get it you’re sooooo much cooler than all of us because you grew up in California and grew your shitty emo fringe out and you know so much more than all us “townies” and “preps” ..whatever loser._

_Sorry everyone, really needed to vent. Some guys can just be so fucking rude and annoying that it ruins the party for you._

_10:44 AM - 7 Comments - 9 Kudos_

Oh it was so worth the effort. He was so upset he posted about it at ten in the morning, the day after the party. That’s crazy. Richie has never been so proud of himself in his life — not even when he finally pulled off a front nose grind at the Culver City skatepark (God he is a shitty California boy), and Ethan, one of the older punk boys from his high school, had managed to capture it on his camera phone. He blue-toothed it to Richie’s slightly shittier phone and it took forever, and they were sort of tentative friends after that. 

He’s riding this high when he scrolls down to the comments and sees the first, from a BethBetH, that just says _rofl eddie ur so random !!! ahaha I saw that guy at the party 2 wat a tool ._

Okay she doesn’t even know him what the fuck. He’s glad they can commiserate about how much he sucks but actually, he doesn’t need to be reading it. 

He clicks out of Eddie’s blog post to Ethan’s page, now that he’d remembered him, and when there’s not much interesting there he goes to You Me at Six’s page, and then through some other bands but he’s still thinking about BethBetH. Whoever the fuck that even is. Fuck it, he’s gonna get so fucking high and listen to High School Never Ends and maybe then he’ll feel better. 

* * *

On Tuesday Richie meets Stan for breakfast in the cafeteria. They both have a ten a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Stan had suggested they have breakfast and walk together to class on those days. It was mutually beneficial, because it forced Richie to show up to class on time in the morning, and forced Stan to have a breakfast instead of having a bite of a granola bar and running out of his dorm straight to class. They meet at the entrance and move through collecting their breakfast components silently, barely awake.

Sitting at the end of one of the big booth tables, they both choke through their mugs of awful black coffee (not even Richie trusts the caf milk and creamer enough to risk diluting this mud with it). Stan got scrambled eggs and half a piece of toast with butter and Richie had gotten a bowl of lucky charms (he picked up two of those little boxes of cereal and picked out just the marshmallows from the second and added them to the first). Stan eyes it warily while he’s eating his eggs.

“You know that’s just going to make you more tired. There’s no nutritional value.”

“Eat my dick and balls for some nutritional value, Stanley.”

“Beep beep, Richie.” He bites a corner of his toast off violently. Richie slurps loudly at his spoon of marshmallows. If him and Stan ever got married he thinks this is what their breakfasts would always be like. Except he’d be wearing a long silk robe and Stan would be reading the news (in print, because his blackberry — or whatever they have in like fourteen years — hurts his eyes) and they’d just bitch at each other for a half hour before they went to work. Or, Stan went to work, and Richie bummed around the house like a bored trophy wife. 

“How’d that forty page reading go Stanny?” 

“It’s like. What the fuck is accounting and why am I majoring in it. That’s how it went.” Richie lays his hand on Stan’s gently where it’s resting next to his coffee cup. Stan looks at him long sufferingly.

“That’s because you make shitty life choices.” He turns his hand around under Richie’s and pinches the skin between his thumb and forefinger.

“Thanks, shit head.” And then his scowl’s smoothing out and he throws a friendly little smile and wave somewhere over Richie’s shoulder. That’s specifically his _trying to make a new friend_ face, because all his existing friends know he’s a bitch in the mornings. “Morning Eddie.”

“Hey Stan.” Eddie the prep comes to stand beside their table, green Abercrombie & Fitch polo clad with a mug of coffee in his hand, backpack thrown haphazardly over one shoulder. Oh, fuck yes. Richie leans back in the booth and rests his arm across the backrest as an invitation to Eddie, who notices and decidedly does not sit in the space Richie just moved out of. He does scowl at his bowl of cereal though.

“Are you seriously having lucky charms for breakfast?”

Richie looks at Eddie’s coffee mug, the only thing he has, and reaches hurriedly for his bowl. 

“Shit sorry, how rude,” he has one last spoonful, making sure to really lick off the spoon, and holds the bowl out to Eddie. “Do you want the rest?” Eddie’s face sours and Richie smiles for the first time since he woke up this morning. Stan kicks at him under the table.

“Where are you headed Eddie?” Stan still looks more than pleasant. Bastard. It’s unfair that only Richie ever has to deal with his rude morning personality. Eddie gulps down what looks like half of his mug of coffee and looks down at the G-Shock strapped to his wrist. 

“I’ve got a ten AM in Cornell Hall.” Stan also looks at his own watch and finishes off his coffee, nodding at Richie in that _let’s head out_ way.

“We’ve both got class in that direction, we’ll walk with you.” Eddie hesitates, not at all trying to disguise the fact that he’s apprehensive about Richie’s presence, but nods anyway. He turns around to lead them out of the caf and Stan throws Richie a _be nice_ look as they’re sliding out of the booth. Richie does a complicated cross my heart motion, including some waving a white flag motions and circling his finger above his head to signal a halo, which he cuts out when Eddie turns around to ask Stan a question about the class Richie assumes they have together. He throws a calculating little look at Richie too, but mostly ignores him. That’s fine. 

Richie lags behind a little bit because he gets distracted trying to perfectly stack his coffee mug on top of another in the dirty dish buckets and when he runs to catch up with them he takes a little once over of Eddie’s outfit. One of his backpack straps is longer than the other and it’s noticeable, and the back of his blonde hair is sleep messy, but his white socks are pulled up and pristine under his boat shoes. 

* * *

On Wednesday, hanging his left arm out the window of his dorm to try and sneak a late night smoke, Richie gets a call from the Radio station, to see if he could come for that informal, super chill don’t worry about it, interview on Saturday morning. And he absolutely could. For sure, for sure, no doubt. Saturday, nine a.m, bright and early. Richie Tozier is a famed morning person. 

* * *

Sometimes, Richie has these dreams that he doesn’t know what to make of. And it’s not as if his unconscious brain isn’t a monster from time to time, throwing all sorts of unpleasantries at him in the night. He’s had dreams where he’s trying to eat a cup of red jello through his hundreds of rows of shark teeth, and all the kids are making fun of him because he can’t eat the jello, in spite of or because of his teeth. And he’s had dreams where his teeth keep chipping off but he can’t stop talking and the shards of his teeth catch on his lips and tongue and he’s bleeding all over himself but he keeps on talking — a waking and dreaming Trashmouth. Bev’s aunt said his teeth specific dreams were typical dreams to have when you’re anxious about stuff. 

He’d had those show up naked to class dreams once or twice (some with happy endings, some with not so much) and dreams where he’s a mermaid with just a shell bra and he’s at the same time her fish best friend and the fork she uses as a mirror and then the ocean itself, his thoughts and body expanding to fill the craters the real ocean left behind when dream Richie had taken its place.

But then there’s these— Sometimes he has these dreams where everything’s just a bit to the left. Those you can’t really remember in the morning but you’re not sure if you really woke up, if everything’s in the same place it’s always been, or if at some point in the night you shifted to match the slightly to the left-ness of the dream and you’ve slipped a bit out of your place, so you’re also slightly to the left. Just slightly out of your own reality. Sometimes he’ll spend two hours in the morning shifting all his furniture a couple inches to the right or left to see if any of it feels right, re-pasting the posters to the walls. It still leaves him feeling out of sorts and unbalanced the whole day. 

He has one of these dreams the night before his interview at the radio station. He was obviouslyanxious about it (regardless of how many times they assured him it was a chill thing) so he’d been expecting some teeth related stuff, spent a full four minutes brushing them, getting himself extra acquainted to give his brain some proper material to work with. If teeth was what he was gonna get, he was gonna be prepared for it.

He wakes up slightly to the left. 

All he remembers is driving home, and feeling both like it was the only place to be and the last place he ever wanted to be, but home wasn’t the home he grew up in, and he wasn’t the him he grew up as. Or maybe he was the him he was going to be. The second he pushes at it he forgets all of it, and when he looks at his alarm clock he’s already ten minutes behind schedule 

He gets out of bed, pulls it out two inches away from the wall to line up with how he woke up, and then gets dressed like he always does.

On his way out he grabs his skateboard, because it’ll look cool probably, to show up on a skateboard. Maybe there’ll be like a cool chick with lip piercings and teased up hair and she’ll see him, in his short dickies and striped long sleeve under a short sleeve Yellowcard shirt combo and his stacked up rubber bracelets from Hot Topic, and fall in love with him. Or want to fuck him at the very least. And the DJ will think he’s so cool and chill that within the first week he’s inviting him into the booth to ask his opinion on what to play next, Sum41 or a Nirvana throwback, and Richie will recommend some of the local bands he’s seen at underground punk shows, and the DJ will be impressed with this knowledge. And it’ll always be the right answer too, the perfect song to meld into the end of the previous one. And then within a month he’ll have his own show where he gets to talk shit, get hit and play hits and it’ll all be so fucking sick. 

What actually happens when he gets there is this: a girl with a zillion tiny braids pulled up in a big bun on the top of her head tells him, first and foremost, to leave his board outside and ushers him in before he’s even had a second to really process that, so he ends up having to chuck it out the closing door behind him. It’s survived worse. She’s moving through the shelves of CDs with a practiced ease and the speed of someone who hasn’t slept a full night in 4 years and is surviving on purely red bull, coffee and adrenaline. 

She’s saying to Richie, “Ok so, like I know this is technically an interview but the station head isn’t actually here yet and we can’t get a hold of him so like I’m just gonna put you to work cause I have an article review due in two hours and I’ve barely started it because ever since the last intern flaked this shit takes up literally all of my time. It’s not hard, you just need to go through this rack of CDs here,” She points to a rolling cart of poorly stacked CDs, god, hundreds of them. Thousands. “Ricky was doing something with them last night, I’m not asking any questions and I promise like, you don’t want to either. They’re all gonna be in the wrong cases so just organize that and shelve them, it’s all in alphabetical and genre order. If you have any questions I’m in the office over there,” she points to the little loft above them where there are two doors, one with blinds pulled down over the windows and the other a DJ booth, “but please, please don’t actually, I have so much to do. And also, don’t fuck up. But you won’t cause this is just like.” She waves a hand vaguely and then he’s alone with the worst case of whiplash recorded, and the millions of CDs. 

He looks up to the almost second floor where she went like maybe this was just a test to see if he scared easy and she’ll come back down and actually explain what the fuck is going on. He spends a couple seconds watching the closed door of the office, and then the current DJ in the booth, a girl with a spiky pink pixie cut, who’s very animatedly saying something into the microphone. Richie can’t imagine what morning news is that exciting. 

He feels time starting to slip away from him in the silence of the room so he turns to the CDs and gets to reorganizing them because like. What else is he gonna do. 

His mother always said cleaning the house was meditative, that she always felt better after doing it. Richie figured it was just her trying to convince him to clean his room for once. He thinks he gets it now though, because the mechanical repetitive motion of this is sort of soothing, especially after the slightly to the left-ness of the morning, it’s nice to reattach to his body. 

He lets time slip away from him this time. 

Eventually he runs out of CDs to stack, and he’s considering going upstairs to tell the girl that he’s done, and to see if there’s anything else she needs from him, but he doesn’t want to bother her, hasn’t actually ever seen anyone that stressed. The time on the big clock above the door says he’s been here for over an hour. He can kill a half hour no problem. 

There’s a broom in the corner of the room knocked over onto it’s side, and he figures he might as well continue channelling his mother and meditatively sweep the floors. Keep himself moving. When he’s truly out of productive things to do he rides the now empty rolly cart down the isles and looks through the CDs they have. There’s a lot he knows, more he doesn’t. Paper and laminate wrapped CDs with four songs on them from local bands, cassettes with sharpie on the front that Richie’s pretty sure he’s been offered on the street for five bucks. There’s a carefully curated section of vinyls in the back of the room, protected from the sun coming in through the front windows and the light from the fluorescents above. He spots some ABBA, Toto IV (which his parents have and he used to steal it to listen to Africa so much he wore down the vinyl just through that track). It looks like they have a full Iron Maiden collection, marked as it’s own genre. The wall behind the cases is lined with what Richie assumes are the most rare, first editions of Queen albums and vinyl in shapes and colours. From the top of the stairs he hears a,

“Hey dude, you done?” 

He’s suddenly aware of his foot resting on the rolling cart, in an obvious _I’ve been riding this unstable thing around in a small space stacked with breakable things, and I intend to hop back on in a second_ gesture. He feels like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. 

“Yeah, I uh… I’m done.” 

The girl comes hopping down the stairs, throwing a confused look at the floor (where there are no longer receipts and coffee stained napkins stuck in the bottom edges of the shelves) and then back at Richie. 

“Don’t touch those vinyls.” He tears his arms away from the shelves of vinyls he was definitely just touching. “Also, sick, you’re hired.” He wants to ask her if she’s majoring in giving people conversational whiplash.

“For real?” She nods.

“Yeah dude. Thanks for helping out.” He shrugs. It really ended up being fine. He thinks. She waves him over to the wall by the front door and points at a couple sheets on the bulletin board.

“This is the schedule, you’ll be taking all the shifts written in for Mick, if you can. If not you can talk to Jazz and see if you can like shuffle some shifts around with her. I don’t know.”

It’s only by some kind of divine intervention and his lazy class selection earlier this summer that the schedule works for him. It’s a six hour shift three times a week, Saturday from 1 to 7, Sunday nights from 6 to midnight and Wednesday afternoons again. Thank god he doesn’t have class on Mondays or Wednesdays. And everyone told him that was a weird schedule at the beginning of the semester. Jokes on them, huh. 

“No, I can totally do this.” She nods at him.

“Cool man. Don’t come in super late, drunk, or high please?”

“I’ll try not to drink at noon on a Wednesday but honestly, depends on how my Tuesday goes.” The girl cracks a little smile at him and pats at his arm placatingly.

“Yeah, Tuesday’s are rough I hear ya. You don’t have to do the shift today, but I’ll see you tomorrow.” She heads then, one foot out one foot in she sticks her head back behind the door and says, “Oh, I’m Mari by the way, nice to meet you, dude.” And then she’s gone.

Richie says, “Nice to meet you too,” to no one and gives Mari a thirty second head start to avoid any awkwardness before he heads out too. 

* * *

Richie’s skateboarding back from his weekly Wednesday late night 7-Eleven run (the further one with the parking lot, so he could show off to no one with some kick flips) carrying his loot of beef chimichangas and a blue raspberry, wild cherry and mountain dew slurpee, when he gets into a collision.

It goes like this: he’s cutting across through the smaller pathways between the residence halls, and there’s a room on the second floor with the light on so he can see inside perfectly where there’s two people arguing. Through the half open window he hears her saying _i like- i can’t fucking believe this_ and he says _babe it was an accident_ and she says _you shit in my fucking bed!_ and he’s in the middle of saying _i was drunk!_ when slurpee, chimichangas and Richie are all being propelled from his skateboard at superhuman speeds.

“Are you fuck- Oh seriously, are you fucking kidding me?” 

He knows the voice. Eddie the Prep, Stan’s class mate (friend?), boat shoe wearer, angry MySpace post-er. The most annoying person Richie’s ever met. 

From where he’s landed, Richie can see Eddie across the pathway from him, sprawled half on the pavement and half in the grass running alongside it. Richie pulls himself up to sitting and avoids Eddie’s glare to inspect the scrapes he can feel starting to bleed along his right elbow and knee. Nothing feels too fucked up. His head is maybe a little more shaken up than usual.

He looks at the mess his slurpee made of the pavement, then at his board (which fucked off and hit a tree thirty feet away), his chimichanga lying just out of the slurpee mess (still miraculously in the bag), and finally back at Eddie’s very red face, and very wet shirt and pants. 

He says, “It kinda looks like you pissed yourself,” at the same time that Eddie says,

“Seriously do you not fucking watch where you’re going?” And Richie’s head is maybe a little bit more scrambled than he thought because all he can say is,

“He shit the bed.” 

Eddie blanches, looking at Richie the way moms look at their rowdy eight-year-old sons when they tell her to shut up in the grocery store, and you know she’s about to fucking murder him. Richie’s been on the receiving end of a few of those in his life. 

“What the f… are you fucking brain dead or something?”

Richie waves a hand uselessly up at the window, where the couple who were just arguing are making out heavily. Is there time to wonder if the shit is still in the bed, or if they cleaned it up and are continuing where they left off? How long ago was there shit in the bed?

Eddie starts getting up, brushing himself down absentmindedly, clumps of dirt and grass detach from his shorts and land around his feet on the pavement. 

“I cannot fucking believe this, really, you’re completely fucking insufferable. First, you skateboard, which is annoying enough on its own,” he starts counting off on his fingers, “you don’t even fucking watch where you’re going when you do, you run into someone, knock them over and all you have to say is ‘he shit the bed’? What does that even fucking mean?” And then he finally looks down at himself and remembers the state of his shirt and pants he says, “And oh, you made me spill my red bull all over myself. Thank you.”

Richie collects his chimichanga and empty slurpee cup on his way up. “There was a couple fighting about him shitting in the bed like, don’t pretend you wouldn’t be distracted too, if you heard that.”

Eddie still looks like he couldn’t care less and also like he’s about ten seconds away from ripping Richie’s head off. 

Richie shrugs, “Look man you could’ve gotten out of my way too so, equal blame here I think. Like, sure you’re pants are a little wet but I lost my hard earned slurpee, so call it even? Whaddya say?” He sticks his hand out to him, which he’s just noticing is also ripped up and there’s gravel stuck in all the shallow bloody scrapes. Eddie looks at it and when he grabs it he squeezes tight, until his knuckles are white and Richie’s wincing in pain that he’s not even exaggerating. Much. 

“No it definitely is fucking not equal blame. If you’re on a thing with wheels you’re the one with the responsibility not to fucking kill people? Also! I did try to get out of your way and you still managed to run into me, because God is punishing me for something.” He mumbles the last bit to himself.

There are a couple seconds while he’s talking where Richie genuinely thinks his hand might break in Eddie’s grip, but Eddie lets go before he has to admit anything to him. He thinks he could read it on his face anyway — has always felt like he’s far too easy to read. He makes a big show of cradling his hand to his chest once it’s been returned to him, checking to see if anything’s broken and wincing in pain a lot. Eddie’s not even in the least bit amused, but he’s not getting any angrier either and that takes a lot of the joy out of this whole experience. Richie throws his hands up in a _so what now_ gesture and lets them drop to his sides.

A long silence follows where they just stare at each other, Richie shifty in all the ways Eddie doesn’t seem to be, and he’s getting increasingly more intimidated by the way Eddie sets his jaw. Unlike Richie, his face gives nothing away, and he’s not sure if he’s about to get the shit kicked out of him by some 5’6” wanna be frat bro in a polo or get the cops called on him — he’s also got pretty strong soccer mom energy, Richie wouldn’t put that past him. Neither of those things happen. Eddie simply sticks his hand out to Richie palm side up, and for a crazy moment Richie thinks he wants him to hold it.

“Give me your laundry card, this load’s on you.”

Fuck. The joke potential in that sentence is so overwhelming that he can’t actually vocalize any of them.

“Absolutely fucking not. Honestly Edward, you should be thanking me! Sure, it looks like you pissed yourself, but if that stains you’ll never have to wear this outfit again! I’ve given you a gift here, really.” 

Eddie narrows his eyes and swiftly kicks him in the shin.

While Richie’s bent over clutching his leg and groaning in pain he feels Eddie duck around him and pull his chain wallet out of his pocket. Fuck, his mom had been right, the pockets on these shorts were way too baggy and easy to pickpocket. He swings around to get at him, a little unbalanced from standing up too quick, and he stumbles when Eddie tugs on the chain that’s still connected to his belt loop. His shorts almost fall off. His mom was also right about the inefficiency of his lopsided studded belt too.

“Hey watch it I’m attached to that!” 

Eddie only pulls again at the chain in response and his shorts slip another couple inches down, tangling awkwardly around his legs. Richie grabs at his waistband with one hand and reaches the other out to Eddie, a chains length away from him, to no avail.

“Are you really fucking robbing me ri—” But Eddie’s already holding his laundry card in his hand and throwing the wallet squarely back at Richie’s chest. 

“I’ll give it back to Stan in class. Hope I never have to see you again, bye.” 

“Never? But I’ll miss you oh so dearly!” He gathers up his wallet by the chain and shoves it back into his pocket. “Also fuck you!”

Eddie throws a middle finger over his shoulder as he’s walking away. 

Fuck. Richie’s running out of time to make good on the promise he made to Bev at the party he first met Eddie at, but. He really wants to make good on some parts of that promise — he’s not sure yet which. 

* * *

Richie meets a very confused Stan for breakfast. He hands him his laundry card and says, “Why did Eddie have this?”

And Richie pockets it and says, “I ran into him on my skateboard and then he robbed me.”

And Stan says, “Eddie robbed you?” 

Richie shrugs at him like _what can you do?_ and Stan sighs in that very Stan way of his that says _it is the fucking morning and I’m not dealing with anything yet._ They have a characteristically silent breakfast. Richie doesn’t even make any dick jokes for once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a rewrite of a fic that i started and didn't like the direction of if she looks familiar thats why  
> dont forget to like n subscribe and hit that bell button if u wanna be notified next time i post a video! *un copyrighted music outro*


	2. i've got the gift of one liners

Bev’s waiting for him on the quad with a cigarette tucked behind her ear. Her bangs are manic panic purple today, as are her hands from the dye residue, but her nails are painted a bright blue, same as Richie’s. Twinsies!

“Miss Marsh is that a cigarette I see! On school grounds!” He’s doing his old British lady voice, which sounds like maybe a ghost in a play for children at best, too heavy on the wavering sort of deathbed-y weakness, not enough of like, The Queen or whatever. He’s working on it. She flicks some dirt onto his pants as he sits down, and calls him an idiot but offers him a cigarette still. 

“We’re literally adults Richie.” He snorts. When she lifts her zippo to light her smoke he grabs the book peeking out of her opened messenger bag. There’s a familiar pair of pale pale hands holding an apple on it.

“How’s your vampire porn going?”

“It’s,” she swipes at his arm to get it back but he ducks away, halfway to his feet, “I told you it’s not porn, it’s just vampires,” she pulls his leg out from under him and grabs the book from where he drops it to steady himself. 

“Yeah, but sexy vampires?” He does something complicated with his eyebrows, and she swats at him with the book for good measure but rips it away again when he reaches for it, shoving it into the bottom of her bag. 

“ _Just_ vampires. It’s like sort of a mystery, sort of a horror. Or whatever. It’s not like,” she pauses to finally light her cigarette after his rude interruption, “I’m not that far into it, anyway, so.”

“Okay well, let me know when it gets hot and heavy, Bevvy. If it makes you wanna y’know, release some tension you know where to find m—” again she throws some ripped up grass and dirt at him. He can imagine how clogged up the washing machine in his res hall’s getting from cleaning all this dirt out of his clothes, but what can he say? It’s not a good joke until he’s physically assaulted for it. (And how often does he really wash his clothing anyway? Only when someone else yells at him for being disgusting, and even then usually only when it’s Stan, honestly).

“Anyway,” Bev says, taking advantage of the fact that Richie’s shut up long enough to light his cigarette, “do you wanna go to Hot Topic later? There’s some new Emily the Strange merch that I want.” 

Richie doesn’t think there’s a lot of money in his bank account right now, but unfortunately he can’t ever say no to the opportunity to go to Hot Topic — or the inevitable food court trip after where they’ll sit somewhere and mock everyone passing by with the Hollister, A&F, Von Dutch, Juicy Couture holy quaternity (which is trinity but for four things) of tacky and awful and dreadfully boring.

“Fuck yeah I wanna go with you to Hot Topic. Do you think we could get some more hair dye?”

“You’d have to bleach it if you wanna do anything other than black.”

“What about just a really dark colour?”

“I don’t know, maybe. We can try.” She tugs on a strand of his hair and inspects it in the sunlight. “If nothing else we can get you some clip in extensions.”

“Oooooh, I love those coon tails. Let’s do that.”

* * *

Richie works his third shift with Mari again — although it’s the last they’ll work together — and she’s looking far less stressed than when he’d seen her on last. She comes in with coffees for everyone at the studio and a Red Bull for him (he owes her $2), and a copy of the receipt from the cafe, so he can bring the coffees next time. He looks at the total and feels it like a punch to the gut.

“Oh don’t worry you’re not paying for it, there’s a coffee fund jar in the office. There’s like, a little sticky note next to it where we just like write what we want and drop some change for it.” He can feel the relief in his fucking toes. There’s so many shots of espresso and flavoured syrups in the coffee for Ricky — the station head, who’s kind of weird — that the total’s over $20 for three coffees.

She doesn’t go up to the office this time because she’s done all the scheduling for the next couple weeks, and also, mostly, because Ricky’s up there doing whatever it is he does with all these CDs. Richie and Mari organize some more of Ricky’s previously discarded discs, and Richie runs a couple up to the DJ currently working when he asks (and Richie truly, truly, does not know this guy’s name) and then when they’re out of things to mindlessly clean and reorganize they try to ride around on the little rolly cart at the same time for a while. It’s fun, and when the pink spiky haired DJ from his first Saturday comes in to pick something up Mari goes all blushy and stuttery. That’s new, fun and interesting. 

On her way out a couple hours before Richie — _“You’re done with training Richie!”, “That was training?” —_ Mari tells him about a party her and her roommates are throwing in their apartment off campus. 

“You can come if you want.”

“Yeah for sure, but I’ve got a codependency issue, is it okay if my friends come? It’s only three of them.”

She smiles and the little gold star plated on her canine tooth glints in the fluorescents. “Fucking yeah you can and should. Hope they’re cuter than you.” He throws up the finger at her but she’s already basically out the door. He’s never met a person who moves faster than her, and he’s himself, y’know? 

He texts all his friends variations on _party tnite xP pree my dorm @ 9_ to Stan, Bev and Ben. 

Bev sends _get me a 4 LOKO I'm going craycray toniteeeeeeee_ , Ben says _snax on me !!_ and Stan asks if he can bring a friend from class.

* * *

After work Richie picks up a twelve pack of PBR and a watermelon Four Loko for Bev from the only store that will accept his fake. It’s a twenty minute walk from campus, and totally worth it, if only because he doesn’t have to listen to Bev and Stan bitch at him for leeching off of them for their hard earned alcohol and Ben’s hard earned weed. 

At his dorm — a single only because there’s about four square feet at the front of the room that got pushed in to make room for a janitor’s closet in the hall — he only has time to throw the ever growing pile of clothing collecting at the foot of his bed and on his computer chair haphazardly into his closet, and swipe a couple snack wrappers into the garbage under his desk. He’s opening the window to let out some of the weed and axe body spray scent that just about occupies a physical form when Bev, Stan and the un-named classmate he brought stream into Richie’s room without knocking, already mid conversation. Richie moves to sit in his computer chair so he can spin in circles and smile up at his friends talking around him. When he catches on to what’s happening he’ll insert himself into the conversation, with hopefully the dirtiest and easiest joke possible. 

The friend Stan brought with him is a tall, pretty girl with a shock of tightly curled dark brown hair around her head, a little white headband struggling against it to keep it away from her face. Richie zeroes in on the way Stan blushes up at her. Despite the upperclassman party they’re going to she doesn’t seem like she’s trying hard to impress anyone, baggy grey zip up thrown over a denim skirt and a t-shirt with a big yellow and green flower on the front. It’s an almost childish outfit actually. She’s even wearing Uggs with it and Richie’s doing everything in his power to pretend they’re not there.

Bev throws herself onto Richie’s bed, both hands stretched out — with one she’s holding up four fingers and with the other she’s making a grabby motion.

“Loko?”

“Jesus Bev, what, are sentences obsolete now?” But he spins out of the chair and right into the fridge, chucks the watermelon flavoured demonic entity at Bev, says, “Hope you vomit that later tonight.” 

“Four Loko tastes better coming up than anything else does.” And she’s got it up to her mouth, taking long chugs before she’s even finished the last syllable.

Richie grabs a beer from the pack for himself, Stan and Stan’s friend — he still doesn’t know her name.

Stan accepts the offered beer, and so does the girl, who offers a surprised _oh,_ in return, and then Stan realizes he’s just brought a complete stranger into Richie’s room and not even said hi to him, let alone told him who exactly was in his space.

“Right, Patty this is my friend Richie.” He gestures back and forth between them like _please do the rest of this yourselves_. Stan’s always hated introducing people. 

Patty taps the can against Richie’s and opens it at the same time one handed, with a little nod.

“Well hey, thanks for the beer,” and that’s honestly a way smoother introduction than Richie has ever managed. He smiles back at her, and throws an arm around Stan’s shoulders. 

“So tell me Patty,” He takes a long pull from his beer, “How’d you meet our boy Stanny?” He says, because he likes when he almost rhymes his sentences.

“We have introduction to macroeconomics together.” 

“Hmm.” He strokes at his chin. If life always went the way he wanted it to, right now there’d be a gold monocle balanced across his nose with a delicate stemmed glass of wine in one hand and a crystal topped walking cane in the other. In a voice matching this version of himself he says, “What, the pray tell, fuck, is a macroeconomic?”

Of course he zones out while they explain, because he’s not actually interested in economics and refuses to think about numbers right now. He’s really more interested in why Stan’s let him lean on him for so long. The closest he can get to a reason is that he doesn’t want to look like a bitch in front of Patty, which is fair, because she looks sweet, but it can’t be healthy to be hiding such an integral part of himself from the woman of his dreams. And she must be, because Stan’s never even mentioned a girl to him, let alone brought her to a party with them. 

When they’ve finished explaining it Richie says, “Good good, very good. I didn’t understand any of the words you said, but I’m glad you said them.”

Because he lives the furthest away Ben shows up last, pushing his way into the room with a polite knock on the doorframe.

Bev smiles around a, “Ben! How are you my dear?” and waves from her place on Richie’s bed, where she’d been happily sipping her Four Loko and watching Richie meet Patty. 

He hums an almost response around the bag of chips that he’s holding in his teeth so he can close the door gently behind him. He’s wearing his letterman jacket and a pair of light wash jeans. Richie says,

“Oooooh how’s jock life treating you mister letterman?” And does a complicated dance with his eyebrows. Ben lets out his big _HA_ laugh, the kind of laugh that you can’t contain, the kind that you’re embarrassed by if you’re not around the people who know how you sound in all your laughs. He grabs the bag seamlessly with his newly freed hand as it falls from his mouth. Incredible.

“I get up at five every morning to get all my workouts done, I have three hours of practice a day and then classes and homework. I like, barely have time to do my hair.” 

“Are you saying the movies lied to me?” Richie grabs a beer from the twelve pack and goes to trade it for some of the snacks Ben’s holding. “Is the life of a college athlete not all booze and babes?”

“Sorry to break it to you.” Ben settles in against the wall at the bottom of the bed, like a reasonable person, and Richie throws himself down across him and Bev, hand coming to rest delicately over his forehead.

“Oh, how ever will I survive this deception! Mr. Handsome— I mean Hanscom, I fear you may need to… Revive me.” And makes a big deal of gasping and then holding his breath, lips conspicuously puckered.

Ben grabs Richie’s jaw loosely with his free hand, and then he leans over him real slow and Richie’s thinking about how his breath must smell after all the coffee and cigarettes and now beer he had today and also what the fuck is happening — and then Ben’s shoving two sour cream and onion Pringles right into his mouth where he’d had it gaping open in confusion. 

He crunches a _fuckin delish, thanks_ around them as he chews. 

Ben is introduced to Patty over where Richie’s still lying on his lap, chewing on some chips Bev’s throwing into his mouth.

At 11 they’re at the party. It’s fully jumpin’ and Richie can’t find Mari anywhere. Patty had run into some people she knew and Stan has been following her around all moony eyed all night, so he’s there too. Bev’s in the kitchen trying to steal someone’s poorly protected bottle of booze when they’re not looking — because the one Four Loko hadn’t been enough apparently — while Ben blocks her from view with his football star shoulders. 

At 11:30 Richie finally finds Mari, though now he’s lost the rest of his friends completely. She’s wearing dark green cargo pants and a BUCK FUSH tee that stops just before the waistband. She yells _Richie!_ almost right in his face, taps her cup of jungle juice against his and drags him out to the makeshift dance floor they made of her living room. They’re playing Sk8r Boi. That’s fine, Richie can jump around to some Avril Lavigne. 

“Did you know she only learned how to skateboard for the image?” Mari yells into his ear. “She’s a total fraud.”

He didn’t know that.

At 12:30 Ben finds Richie on the balcony smoking with Mari and her roommates. Instead of talking, they all scream over each other,

“We’re all fire signs so we have to yell,” says Mari. 

Her roommate who’s name Richie knew at the beginning of the night but now only knows starts with an S says, “Fuck you bitch I’m only yelling ‘cause you don’t listen to anything but your own voice,” and the third one cackles loudly saying, “Stop both of you, I’m trying to hit a fucking bowl,” and it devolves into more yelling of _that sounds like a personal problem_ and _you could just stop laughing bitch we’re not even being funny._

They’re too invested in their argument to notice Ben when he looks at Richie through them and says, “Bev’s had too much to drink.” Oh boy.

Richie motions to Mari that he’s gotta go inside and she waves at him with the hand holding her cup of jungle juice and it spills. The door closes on all of them screaming in laughter about it.

Richie’s had a lot to drink and smoke tonight too, he realizes. He’d felt fine standing out in the night air, leaning against the balcony railing, but in here, walking through the crowded apartment, he feels his head detaching completely from his body. Every person he passes feels like a copy and paste of the last person he passed and Ben somehow is managing to move through the crowd while Richie’s just tripping over his own two feet in the same place.

Towards the washroom the apartment narrows into a hallway but the crowd doesn’t thin out. Richie tries to pass through it as considerately as he possibly can when his head is floating above his spine and his feet are attached backwards, but there’s another person trying to do the same thing in the opposite direction, and as they pass each other their foot catches on either or both of Richie’s and everything is suddenly so so fast for a brief moment. Some of his beer spills on someone’s bright blue shirt. 

“Ah shit, sorry I didn’t— It’s so fucking crowded and I don’t have legs—” And then it’s Eddie turning around. His collar is popped, his eyes blazing. “Ah, Edward. We have to stop running into each other like this.” 

Someone says _excuse me_ behind Richie and he’s jostled forward into Eddie’s space, the hallway dilates and shrinks around him with the motion. Eddie keeps his hands up between their chests and he’s pushing Richie away as soon as he can.

“What is this, are you intentionally seeking me out just to spill shit on me?”

“Okay give me some credit. If this was on purpose you’d be… soaked.” It’s almost the joke he wants to make. 

“You’re the worst person I’ve ever met.”

Richie tilts his head with a little smile, “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“I’m sure it’s the nicest thing anyone will ever say to you.”

Richie snorts and then sighs, reaches out to flick — not gently — at the popped collar of Eddie’s shirt. It wobbles ridiculously at his jaw. He opens his mouth to retort when he hears _Richie!_ from down the hall and oh, right, Bev, vomit. He points a thumb over his shoulder to where Ben called him from.

“There’s nothing I want more than to stay here with you Eddie dear, but fate tears us apart yet again.” He blows him a little kiss. “Until we see each other again.”

“Die.” 

Richie lets Ben pull him away through the crowd and toward the washroom.

Bev, cradling the toilet, says, “It does not. Fucking taste. Like watermelon. Anymore.”

* * *

**To: Stanley the Manley 9:38 A.M**

_whr ru I'm outside ??_

**From: Stanley the Manley 9:38 A.M**

_Opposite end of the usual table with Eddie. You’ll see us._

Richie bounds up to the table holding one bowl, three mini boxes of Lucky Charms, a small carton of milk, and two spoons. 

He waves from a couple feet away with the hand that’s full of cereal boxes, “Staniel and Eds! My favourite breakfast buddies!”

He drops into the seat next to Eddie, dumps one whole box of the Lucky Charms right into the bowl and begins methodically separating out the marshmallows from the other two boxes. Eddie barely looks up from his Razr, where he’s typing some very angry messages.

“Don’t call me Eds, we’re not friends.”

There’s only like, fifteen marshmallows in one of the boxes, what a rip off. Also, “Does that mean I can call you Eds when we are friends?”

Eddie scoffs. “As if that would ever happen.”

“Gosh golly sir, don’t break my heart so! Why, I surely did think this relationship was going somewhere beautiful.” He’s doing his Southern Belle voice, high in twang, high in pitch, low in caliber. Anyone could do a Southern Belle. At the same time it’s the only one that ever got a cackle out of Stan… although he was high that time, so.

“A relationship this,” he points between himself and Richie, “is not. Actually I think it’s called harassment.”

“Harassment! Why I never…” He does a quick and under dramatized fainting motion, to save time. “Eddie dearest, this is pure fate. It seems the Big Man,” he points up at the ceiling with the hand not holding the carton of milk, “wants us to be friends, I’m only following his wishes.”

“Unfortunate. I’m an atheist.” Behind him his phone nearly vibrates off the table with a slew of incoming vibrations, and he scrambles to fumble it back up onto the surface.

Richie grins, “Believe or don’t believe what you want to, but there are unexplainable machinations of the universe that are pushing us together and I for one don’t think we should fight it.” 

Then, he takes a spoonful of cereal and shoves it into his mouth, so that when he offers the other spoon to Eddie some milk dribbles out of his mouth down his chin and right back into the bowl. Predictably (and it says something that he’s predictable to someone who’s had three and a half interactions total with him) Eddie recoils with a disgusted yell and throws one of the empty cereal boxes at Richie’s milky grinning face.

“Children. Please, behave. It’s the morning.” Stan’s impression of Richie’s dad is impeccable. 

* * *

October starts with a yellow washed out kind of day. The pavement’s too bright to look at and the sky’s unbearably blue and huge and spotless, Richie feels half out of his skin at the shininess of it all. He looks up at the mountains and imagines the Hollywood sign catching fire, imagines it reflecting all that horrible heat back at the city and burning it to crisp the way his weird cousins used to burn ants with magnifying glasses. Richie feels like those ants right now, skateboarding down his parents’ quiet suburban street at midday on a Sunday. He can’t fucking escape any of it. 

His parents aren’t home, and he was counting on that. He uses the key under the fake rock at the bottom of the porch stairs to sneak in to eat some leftovers. Upstairs in his room he sits on the window ledge and has a cigarette to feel like he’s got big earth shattering secrets again. The trick to that is that they weren’t earth shattering. The smoking and the drinking and the drugs and the sneaking out. None of that was as earth shattering as— whatever this unnamed thing that’s got its claws around the base of his skull is. Whatever it is that makes the air feel this heavy.

Outside again, to get away from all the bone shivering nostalgia of his childhood bedroom, he drops into the emptied out pool in their backyard, and lets the familiar and endless curvature of it soothe all his frayed edges.

* * *

CALC 201 is a bore that he’s deeply regretting taking. He thought it would be an easy credit — and it probably will be — because he was decidedly nerdy early in high school and did a lot of independent calculus studying and ended up years ahead of his grade level. He vandalizes the desk when he can’t focus on the board anymore, and then feels so incredibly juvenile for doing it that he spends the last fifteen minutes of class trying to scrub the _fuck this_ he’d written in pen off. It’s only half successful and when he leaves it looks more like a _fucl his_ which is better, at least. 

Bev had asked him to meet her in the library after his class, because the Situations video came out and Bev thinks Ronnie Radke is an ungodly kind of sexy and likes to gush about it to Richie. Privately, he agrees with her — in both the way where he styles his hair to look kind of like him, and in the way where he’d like to get under him — and Bev knows about one of those definitely, having dyed his hair for him, and probably about the other one, too. She doesn’t bring it up, because she’s good like that. 

On the way up the stairs to the library he passes Greta Keene and The Gang and accidentally makes eye contact with one of her newer friends, Jemma, a girl who grew out of awkward and lanky the summer before senior year of high school, and got her braces taken off and Greta decided she was pretty and clean enough to hang out with. Also, Jemma’s parents are loaded and never let it be said that Greta doesn’t know how to seize a good opportunity when she sees one. 

Anyway, she’d invited Richie to the first party she threw as an official Mean Girl. They’d sort of been friends in high school so he showed up and brought her a wine cooler he’d stolen from his mom’s hidden stash in the garage, and him and Jemma had made out for a bit in the back yard behind the shed. Like, she knew it was a faux pas to invite Richie — and be seen with him in general — but still wanted to make out with like, a real live emo boy. Or whatever. He hasn’t interacted with her at all since but it’s still like. Kind weird of awkward. Mostly on her end.

He pulls his cell out of his pocket and texts Bev a _where_ _r u,_ mostly to have something else to look at, pretends he doesn’t know the way someone jabs their shoulder into him is intentional. He didn’t even see who it was so really what’s the point, other than that now he smells like glittery body spray from PINK a little bit. 

Bev texts _2nd floor_ _back right_ just as he’s pushing through the turnstiles. He drops his bag on the floor loudly to alert her of his presence and drags a chair over to Bev where she’s pulling up youtube on the world’s slowest computer. There’s a pair of Skullcandy head phones plugged in already and she hands him an earbud and a piece of gum. Perfect. This is the kind of library trip Richie can fucking enjoy. 

* * *

The past few weeks he’s lived sort of outside himself. He walks along himself to class, sits in the row behind and kicks at the back of his own seat to try to motivate himself into taking notes, holds his own hand when he’s retching into a toilet bowl after two many drinks, rolls his eyes at his friends behind his own back when he spaces out too far, drops off the edge of the earth. 

It’s that to the left-ness again. He woke up wrong and hasn’t been able to grab tightly enough around the wrist of his other self to drag them back into one being.

At night he lies on his bed on top of the sheets and tries to force himself under them. He’s not even tired. There’s so much stifling heat everywhere and the air in here is too dense for all that freshness from outside to break through. He chokes on it until the lack of oxygen knocks him out eventually, on top of his sheets in his day clothes, stacking up the ever teetering tower of roaches in the ashtray he keeps on his nightstand.

When he does fall asleep he dreams of flying down streets he’s never seen on a bike he never had, hands off the handle bar and someone’s saying _keep doing shit like that, moron, and see who feels sorry for you when you flip over that thing and smash your head to bits,_ so Richie pops a wheelie and does fall backward into water that isn’t tepid and salty, the way the ocean he’s used to is. When he resurfaces the scene is green, a slate cliff rising in front of him and he shields his eyes from the sun with a dripping hand, squints his eyes up at the top of it and yells _just jump! don’t be a fucking pussy_ but he can’t remember who he’s supposed to be yelling it to. The water splashes and wavers around him like someone’s joined him, but no one’s there, and seaweed, or a hand wraps around his ankle and he comes up the other side of the water in a bed he knows is his from dream logic but looks nothing like the bed he occupies now or the one he grew up in, dripping that same moss green water onto the sheets. There’s a tapping at his window and when he turns his head to look at it, he finds he’s just looking at the blurry sideways image of his dorm room window.

On nights he can’t pass out, he’ll shove his hands in the pockets of the biggest hoodie he owns and wander campus until the rising sun blinds him back into the darkness of his dorm.

* * *

The sun sets before Richie’s done work now, as October pulls them deeper into fall — only in word and not in definition, it is after all Los Angeles: The Place That Seasons Forgot. He skips the part of his day where he eats shit in the 7 Eleven parking lot trying to do nose grinds on the cement block parking separators, jumps right to the part where he’s speeding back to his dorm. His shadow jumps along with him now in the streetlights, instead of trailing behind in rosy evening light. 

Where he can he takes a back alley, skirting around dumpsters and Toyotas and vacant lots, needlessly fenced off. A tired cook smoking on the back stoop of a restaurant pulls his feet in and yells at Richie to slow the fuck down as he speeds past. He can’t hear him over his music nor the low current of the rumble of wheels against uneven pavement, sending shockwaves up his legs and straight into his chest cavity. He cuts across the whole foods parking lot and through the two near conjoined strip malls just under campus, and then up through the littered houses of the frats and sororities. Fuckin’ gag. 

He slows down from his breakneck speed turning into one of the darker pathways off the main streets through campus. The shadows of the trees here block what light he could use from the moon and glowing light pollution to see where he’s going. He’s taking the curve behind Rieber up to Hedrick when suddenly up ahead there is a person heading towards him. It doesn’t mean much, people walk everywhere all the time. He’s seen ‘em. The thing is, something is familiar about this scene, almost, just to left of something that’s happened before. A motion sensor light triggers on and for a second Richie’s blinded, and then it’s Eddie walking towards him, defiant and angry already in the face of Richie and his skateboard.

Ripping out his earphones Richie pulls over to the side of the pavement farthest away from Eddie. He does a little bow at him. 

“Never fear again Eduardo, I have learned from past mistakes.”

“The fact that you had to learn not to run people over says enough.”

“You could just thank me!” Richie has to turn around awkwardly to yell this at Eddie as he passes him.

And Eddie’s rolling his eyes at him but Richie can only actually assume that, because his board — now slower than the rest of him — catches in a dip in the pavement and he’s once again, on this same cursed stretch of pavement, sprawling forward off his feet. Thank god he skipped the slurpee this time. 

From down the laneway he hears the uncontrollable laughter of his arch nemesis, those hiccoughing breathless sort of i’m-gonna-die laughs. He finds himself smiling along with him.

And Richie lies there facing skyward on the ground, and laughs and laughs and laughs. 


	3. slow, burn, let it all fade out, pull the curtain down

Like any other Monday, October 23rd starts at noon. It also starts with Richie hitting a bowl to ease the edge off his headache and then brushing his teeth because he’d gotten home from work after midnight and had forgotten to do it then. The rotting flavour of the inside of his mouth right now isn’t entirely pleasant. He promptly passes back out.

So actually, Monday October 23rd starts at three in the afternoon, with a headache that pounds worse than the one had at noon— no his door. There’s a pounding on his door, fuck. He rolls out of bed ass over head and tugs on a pair of basketball shorts and hopes that whoever it is won’t be gravely offended that he’s shirtless. Then again this is the wakeup he gets — the pounding has yet to stop — so maybe he doesn’t actually care if they’re offended.

Without his glasses on he miscalculates the distance between his hand and the doorknob and fumbles it for a second, and when he gets it finally open theres a _Richrichrich guess what day i— Jesus did you just wake up_ waiting for him from the orange and black smudge in the hall.

Bev, he assumes, pushes past him. Richie closes the door and yawns big, scratching at his chest, and then there’s a pressure on his nose and — ah, the world in 720p. It is Bev. Thank god. 

“So guess what day it is!”

“Uh. I mean I’m pretty sure it’s October?” He yawns through it and collapses back on his bed face first. 

Bev’s presence vibrates with an unfamiliar urgency at the side of his bed. “Rich. The album’s out.”

“What fucking al—” Richie jerks up to sitting, glasses nearly flying off his face. Bev’s hovering next to his bed in her black skinnies and hanging green suspenders, hands wrapped tightly around the strap of her messenger bag. “The My Chemi— fucking. Holy shit.” 

Bev rips open the flap of her bag and pulls out with shaking hands a CD case, still wrapped in plastic with the big explicit sticker across the front. Richie reaches out with his own hands and grabs the bottom two corners of it, and they sit there for a moment, both cradling this tiny plastic case, and stare at the little marching band skeleton with awe in their eyes and their hearts in their throats.

Richie should get the speaker. He pushes past her and to the other side of his room where the little round radio he brought from home sits on his shelf, pops out Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. Behind him Bev rips the plastic off the album and places the CD into the dock while he’s putting the Blink CD in a New Found Glory case. She pops the lid down and then there’s the dilemma of,

“How are we listening to this?” Bev says.

“I’m lying back down, dude."

“Okay but do we bring the speaker closer or just turn it up loud?”

“Both?”

“Okay, yeah.”

Bev picks it up by the handle and drags it over as far as the cord will allow and sits down criss cross applesauce on the linoleum floor in front of it. Richie flops back down on the bed. She presses play and scoots back over to the side of the bed, leaning up against it by Richie’s head so that they can look through the booklet together. All bets are off on understanding what Gerard’s saying, and they’ve only got two hours to listen to this before Bev has class, which isn’t enough time to be fucking around trying to figure it out on their own. 

Richie’s heart feels like it’s in sync with the beeping of the heart monitor as the CD starts — and even though the moment’s kind of ruined when Bev has to lean forward to turn the volume up a little — the drums hit with the same top of the throat feeling Richie gets when he’s skateboarding down a steep hill with no intention of slowing down, and they both let out a soft _oh my god_ in unison. It’s fucking Happening.

Twenty minutes in finds them with Richie’s chin on Bev’s left shoulder, arm dangling over the right one, so he can point at the lyrics he really likes as Gerard says them, without interrupting the music. In the silent seconds between songs Bev says _do you have the urge to scream right now?_ and Richie says _I feel like, feral._ He feels his bones shake with the urge to release whatever this song just shook loose in him. House of Wolves is fucking right. 

Later, they sit there in the complete silence post album, hearts in their hands, and Bev turns to Richie and says,

“I think I liked Three Cheers better.”

Richie says, “Yeah, me too. Play it again.”

* * *

Bev leaves him with the CD to go to class, and while it’s burning onto his computer he swivels to face the My Chem poster up above his bed. There are several facts of the universe that he can’t ignore, and one of them is that objectively, Gerard was really hot with long black hair, and less fact but just as true in terms of Richie’s experience of the universe, is that the blonde hair isn’t as hot. Something about it being so closely slicked to his head. He’s not sure. And he’s not thinking about it too hard — it’s just one of those things. Gerard can be pretty, all the way over there in band land where people aren’t real. And then here, just between him and the posters on his wall Richie can think, band guys are hot. It doesn’t carry on to outside of this room often.

The band stares back at him, resentful and covered in blood in their high school classroom set. The way they look right now, if they could talk to him, they’d say _you wouldn’t steal a car._ But Bev paid for this CD, and that’s not that far a separation from him paying for it. It’s not pirating. This doesn’t count. 

He spends the rest of the time it takes to download the CD lamenting the loss of Gerard’s long black hair (and the red eyeshadow) and the artfully dishevelled school uniform. The CD spins on, pitifully loud. 

* * *

This time of year, Richie’s less reluctant to be outside before the sun goes down. Stan and Ben say it’s because he refuses to wear anything but black, and maybe that’s fair, but if his high school tormentors couldn’t bully him out of wearing black all the time he’s not gonna let the sun do it. It can’t even fucking punch him. 

He finds himself taking longer, slower ways home. Half because he wants to cruise around with his big headphones on and a cigarette hanging between his fingers — and secretly hope that people think he’s cool and untouchable. The other half is because something about sitting in his room for the dark hours through the middle of the day makes him feel less like he’s sitting in his bed and more like he’s buried in it.

Passing through the centre of campus — finally comfortably wearing a black long sleeve shirt in the middle of the day, even if his fringe sticks a little too closely to his forehead — he spots Stan sitting hunched over a textbook at one of the few picnic benches scattered around, and redirects himself over to him. 

Richie launches himself forward across the table, up by his arms and then flopping down (painfully) onto his stomach on top of all of Stan’s papers and textbooks.

“What the fuck, Richard?” 

Richie pillows his head on his arms and looks up at Stan. The top of his face is pinched and the bottom of his face a calm and forcedly relaxed straight line. A classic Stan face. 

“What are you up to?”

“What does it look like I’m doing. Be honest.”

Richie reaches under his torso to where something’s digging into his ribcage and pulls out a spiral bound notebook. He pushes up to his elbows and flips it open to a random page, kicks his checkered Vans up in the air and mimes like he’s writing something down on the already filled pages.

“Dear diary, I talked to Patty today, she’s soooooo pretty but I’m too chicken shit to do anyth—”

Stan rips the fake diary away from him and smacks him across the back of his head with it. 

“What are you, ten?”

“And three quarters!”

“I— Eddie and Ben are on their way here to study too. Can you behave please?”

“God you’re such a nerd Stan.” 

“You could benefit from being a nerd sometimes, y’know,” he jabs Richie in the side hard, repeatedly, until Richie’s forced to move over off all his study materials, “you’ve got midterms to pass too.”

He sits up cross legged in the middle of table facing the far end of the courtyard they’re in. Stan pushes him by one of his knees until he slides over to the far end of the table so Stan can spread out his reading materials again. Richie lets it happen in favour of more interesting sights, namely Eddie, walking up to the table and talking to someone on a red Motorola Razr, animated and angry in a way Richie’s been… somewhat acquainted with. 

He looks at his cargo shorts and rumpled too big A&F polo (collar down, it’s a casual look), and the chopping motion of his hand and thinks, there has never been a better moment to test out new comedic material than right now, on a frustrated Eddie.

“You’re absolutely right, I think I’ll stick around for your little study sesh.”

“Will you actually study?”

“Who’s to say?” 

Eddie slows to a stop just close enough that Richie can hear him saying into the phone speaker _yeah I know you worry— I didn’t mean to miss your call I was in cl— yeah well I wasn’t just gonna text it’s a small seminar. Yeah. Yeah. No I know. Look Myra I’m meeting with a friend to study and— It’s Stan. No I’m n— I’m just gonna go study with my friend okay? Okay. Yeah, I’ll call later… Why do I have to say it end of every phone call? You already kn— Myra I’m already late to meet h— Yeah… I love you too. Bye. Bye._

He snaps the phone shut with a resounding snap, throws his bag onto the bench across from Stan and then also chucks the closed flip-phone onto the table like it’s personally offended him. It skitters across the wood planks and right into the toe of Richie’s checkered vans. Eddie’s eyes follow the path of his phone across the table to Richie’s form, and then track up to his face.

“How are you everywhere?” He doesn’t say it like a question, he says it like it’s a fact of the universe that was put in place to torture him specifically.

Richie tilts his head at him with a toothy grin, “I am everywhere and nowhere, baby.”

With a shake of his head Eddie slides onto the bench across from Stan.

Stan says to him, “He grows on you.” 

Richie points at his chest like _me?_ and Stan looks at him and nods toward Eddie like _please, put in some effort._ Effort he can do, probably. He spins in his place and puts his feet down on the bench next to Eddie, who scrunches his nose up in distaste in the dirt that flies out of the soles of them and onto the wood next to where he’s sitting. 

“Trouble in paradise, Eds?” 

“Is it your fucking business?” 

Stan flicks him in the back.

“I just,” Richie glances at Stan over his shoulder like _what the fuck do you want me to do_ and the set of Stan’s eyebrows says _un-dig yourself outta this hole on your own_. “I’m just asking what’s goin’ on man.” He imbues as much sincerity as he can in it, even if there’s a laugh in the back of his throat struggling to cut through it. 

Eddie flicks up a look at him and then between him and Stan for a couple seconds. There is a debate in his head that Richie can’t parse from the neutral set of his eyebrows and the tightness of his lips. “I’m fine. My girlfriend’s in Ithaca so. Long distance, y’know.” He says most of it toward the table but. Progress? Richie wasn’t aware he was aiming for progress. The things he does for Stan.

And then there’s Ben, settling in to the other side of Richie’s legs. He hadn’t even seen him walk up. They do the complicated handshake they made up in fifth grade as a greeting, even though they forget the middle of it and end up fumbling through several variations of holding hands before they land on the last couple slaps and bumps that they remember. The second it’s done Stan’s wrapping a hand in the back of his shirt and dragging him backward across the table and onto the bench next to him. Honestly, Richie’s just gonna let this happen too. 

Across from them Ben reaches a closed fist out to Eddie and takes the introduction portion of this study meeting out of Stan’s hands, which he seems thankful for. 

* * *

Richie looks at a couple of the syllabuses that were handed out at the beginning of the semester and decides (completely on his own and through none of Stan’s influence or insistence) that he should invest some time into studying for these midterms. So, he finds himself at a cafe just off campus with Mari reading through a course pack he got at the beginning of the semester that he’s barely even cracked open. He just. Does not care about the history of American motion picture like, at all. Who gives a shit about black and white movies, he wants to make the next Anchorman. 

Mari’s got a textbook open with some incredibly complicated looking chemical equations — Richie gets math but there’s all these squiggles and lines in this that he can’t even begin to comprehend. He still lets Mari bitch about the concepts that she’s struggling with the most, nodding dutifully like he understands a word coming out of her mouth.

One hour passes, then two (which is the longest he’s spent studying uninterrupted since he was ten and his mom made him do his homework at the kitchen table so she could supervise him) and then miraculously, a third hour passes. He chugs down the dregs of his second cup of coffee since they got here and still, he doesn’t feel at all awake. Without asking he checks Mari’s mug and when he sees it’s empty too he heads up with both of them to the counter where they offer free refills of shitty filter coffee. She doesn’t even look up to see where he’s going, anyway.

The guy behind the bar takes the cups and says, “You with that chick you’re with?”

“Like… yeah I’m here with the girl I’m here with…”

“But are you fuckin’ her?” 

Richie blinks at him, “Wha…t?” This isn’t a conversation he thinks he’s ever _really_ had y’know? Not sober, during the day, when people are real and saying real things. He’s unsure where to go from here.

“Think she’d be down to clown if I gave her my number?”

“Oh!” He does know where to go from here, actually. “Nope.” The barista hands him the mugs, looking like he might say something else and make this conversation even more unbearable. “Not in a million years, dude.” And then he turns back to their table, feeling like this will be their last refill of the day and maybe their last coffee here, ever. 

He rounds bar to the furthest corner of the cafe where they’d managed to find a table, and there he is: Eddie, standing next to Mari talking with animated hand gestures. He doesn’t realize it’s happening until he hears it, but a laugh bubbles up out of Richie’s chest, a bit giddy from the coffee, and the accidentality of the universe that keeps intersecting their paths. He comes up behind him, places Mari’s coffee down on the table around Eddie’s left side. When he spins to see where the arm came from, Richie ducks around to sit in his own seat to his right side, leaving Eddie spinning for a couple seconds trying to figure out who’s behind him. It’s Richie! Surprise!

Eddie says, “Seriously.”

“Consider it exposure therapy. Before you know it we’ll be bestie for the resties!” He throws a friendly, jock kind of punch at his forearm.

From behind the bar the creep who’d wanted to hit on Mari says, “Ed, if you’re gonna stick around after your shift you might as well pick up a mop or something.” And Eddie throws up a relatively aggressive thumbs up at him and heads out the door with an incredible amount of urgency in his short person legs.

* * *

Bev convinces him to meet her in the library — even though he hates the muffled silence of it — because _you love me and you would do anything for me and I’ll give you weed please come._ So he goes, and sits next to her at a table, and throws crumpled up pieces of paper at her for twenty minutes before she very seriously pins his hand to the table and says _Richard I’ll shave your eyebrows off_. And then he opens his ancient laptop, tunes into some Third Eye Blind, and types and retypes a paragraph of this essay for the next two hours, until Bev slams her head down on the desk and wraps her arms around it. Richie packs up her bag and logs her out of the school computer, and slinging an arm around her shoulders he drags her back out into the world of the living.

Back at Bev’s dorm they put Three Cheers and Black Parade in Bev’s roommate’s fancy CD player with the deck changer, and get so stoned they can’t stand. 

* * *

He’s lying on the cement half wall of one of the ostentatious planters around campus.

The prof for his history of American motion picture course had shoved a couple hours worth of testing into the seventy five minute time slot and Richie was so mentally and physically exhausted (and there’s a joke in there, about wrist pains and being left home alone for a weekend, age twelve) that he’d sort of on purpose, sort of on accident ridden right into the first thing he saw that looked like something he could take a nap on. That was probably twenty minutes ago.

The light filters through the leaves of the trees above him and shimmers through his closed eyelids in flashing little patterns that move too fast for him to grasp any of them. Sounds pass him by and he doesn’t even flinch at any of them, unlike his usual twitchy, nearly obsessive surveillance of the environment. His fingers trace aimless patterns in the dirt of the planter he’s lying next to. 

He’s lived here his whole life and he’s never enjoyed the ever-presence of the warmth like this.

A shadow falls over his eyes, and reluctantly, he squints them open. Above him, haloed by sunlight, is a frowning Eddie. He steps back as soon as Richie’s eyes are open, and then he’s just standing there, eyes flitting down to Richie and then anywhere but him, in dizzying circles. He’s alone, which doesn’t bode well for this interaction, but then again Eddie usually seems to be alone. 

Richie lifts himself up on his elbows and tilts his head at him. “Hey, stranger.”

“Ugh, I wish.” 

“And yet, you seek me out. Something, deep inside your soul calls out, like a foghorn!” He drops his voice to a drawn out boom, “Riiiichiee, Riiichiee, Riiiichiee!”

Eddie looks up at the sky and Richie can see him mouthing _god help me_ , and then he looks back down at Richie and says out loud, “Stan said you’re good at math.” 

“Sure, two plus two equals five.” 

Eddie presses his lips into a tight line, nodding, then he says, “Okay I need your… help.”

“My what?” Richie cups a hand around his ear. 

“I had to take a gen ed and it’s math and I don’t fucking get it, okay? Can you help me or not?” 

Richie’s all teeth, grinning around an, “Of course I can, Eddie Spaghetti.”

Eddie says, “I’ll kill you in your sleep if you call me that again.”

“Sneaking into my room at night? How naughty.” 

Eddie pulls a hand through his hair angrily, pushing it back even though a couple unruly strands fall forward into his eyes anyway. “I have classes almost all day today but. The midterm’s in a couple days could— When do you have time?” He’s white knuckling the strap of his backpack with one hand and cracking every knuckle of his other hand. Richie swings his legs over the edge of the cement wall so he’s fully upright.

It’s Tuesday today, and Richie has work tomorrow until seven. Not that it’s a pattern but the only person Richie’s ever actually seen after his Wednesday shifts is Eddie, and something about seeing him without the forward motion of his skateboard taking him away from (or directly into) him feels strange. 

Still, he says, “I finish at the station at seven tomorrow, if you have time.”

“Seven PM?” He says PM like he’s trying to vocalize the period between the two letters. 

“Yeah, PM,” Richie does an impression of the way Eddie said it. “Is it past your bedtime?” 

“No it’s not fucking past my bedtime— I just.” He looks off. Richie watches his jaw work around whatever he wants to say or not say. “Seven’s fine. It’s all good.”

“Alright comrade,” Richie sticks his hand out to him, still covered in the dirt from his artistic endeavours in the planter. “It’s a deal.”

Eddie jerks back away from it, Richie laughs, and Eddie says, “Seriously, you’re so fucking disgusting.”

* * *

He goes to work. He stacks and reorganizes and tries his best to ignore Ricky’s weird comments about high school girls and tales of the epic highs and lows of high school football — Richie’s best estimate is that he graduated in the 80s. 

And then runs up some clipboard to the DJs currently spinning (a guy and a girl who do an agony aunt sort of thing that Richie will never fucking listen to) when they ask for it, and sweeps and mops — because Ricky won’t come downstairs again if the floor’s slippery, and Richie’s tired of hearing about _let me tell you this, the older you do get the more rules they're gonna try to get you to follow. You just gotta keep livin' man, L-I-V-I-N._ Like, give it up dude. And date a thirty year old maybe.

If he spends a collect total of an hour curled up in the dark back corners of the studio, no one’s there to see, or tell him to stop. If he spends the other five and a half hours of his shift thinking back and forth over how tonight’s gonna go no one’s in his head to stop him from doing that, either.

* * *

He walks to meet Eddie at a cafe near his residence. When he passes the table Eddie’s sitting at from the other side of the window, he knocks loudly and gestures between himself and the door and Eddie, trying to indicate _I see you, I’m just gonna come back in through that door over there and circle back around to where you’re sitting at this table that I see you sitting at, from here, outside this window._ It takes a while. By the time he actually makes any moves toward the door of the cafe Eddie’s got his head cradled in his hands. A perfect start.

He goes up to the counter and gets a brownie, takes the absolute longest he possibly can, deciding what to get just to see the way Eddie’s leg shakes beneath the table. He’ll offer him a bite of the brownie to compensate for it, maybe. 

Eddie says, “Did you take a long time on purpose?” when Richie sits down in the chair across from him.

“Yep.” He pops the _p_ with some extra panache. “Let’s see these fuckin’ mathematics Eds.”

He slams the cover of his textbook open with more force than strictly necessary, “Don’t call me that.” 

And then Richie’s pulling his notebook over to him and flipping through what he’s already done, smacking away Eddie’s hands when he goes to reach for it. “I can’t help you if I can’t see what you’ve already done, man.” And Eddie retracts his hands with a huff, but lays them palms down on top of the table, still on guard. 

Eddie’s notes are written in a blocky, all caps lock handwriting. He writes in perfect straight lines, the top of every letter hitting the exact middle point between the top and bottom lines of the grid, every letter identical to its other counterparts, not a single smudge in sight where he might’ve misspelled something or dragged his hand across the page. Except that all of them are connected in strange places like he refuses to lift the pen from the paper between letters and words. If not for that Richie might’ve thought he was a robot.

Also if he was a robot he would’ve been better at math. Richie flips through the first three pages only and thinks _fuck, this is gonna take forever._

* * *

Some moments in his life Richie experiences in excruciating detail. They drag on with macro focus on every crack in the walls of his room, every acne scar and pore and hair on his face, every noise around him amplified and repeated ad infinitum. There are times when all he can do is breathe through them and their complete startling reality. Others, the ones he likes more, he montages as he goes through them, overlaid with varying saturations and colour filters depending on mood — even the scenes of his life that feel grey and washed out he likes, sometimes. 

He’s a film production student, what?

Studying with Eddie goes like this: Richie tries to work in as many dirty math jokes as he can (anything about curves and deriving or dividing something with something — with lots of eyebrow motions and lewd grins). None of them land, obviously just because Eddie’s bad at math. Eddie’s Razr vibrates with a text that he ignores. Eddie screams into his hands silently, Richie laughs loudly, Eddie kicks the leg of his chair so he nearly tips over. Richie draws half penises in the corners of Eddie’s notebook on the pretence that he’s going to demonstrate something, and all of them trail off the edges of the page where Eddie shoves him off. They’re all in pen though, suck it Eddie. Another text vibration from Eddie’s phone. He opens and closes it without looking, and flips it over so it’s the little preview screen’s face down on the table. Eddie steals half of his brownie in small bites — when he thinks Richie isn’t looking — and Richie calls him out every time, and Eddie blushes over his _fuck you_. They go up to get coffee together and try to out-tip each other and end up tipping five dollars each for their two dollar coffees. Eddie’s phone nearly vibrates off the table with a slew of ignored messages and phone calls. Richie fumbles a pencil so epically that it ends up flying into the cappuccino of the woman at the table next to them. Eddie fails to stifle his laughter while Richie apologizes profusely. 

At times, Richie finds himself leaned back in his chair, stretching an arm out over the back rest of Eddie’s in a way that’s more comfortable than him and Eddie are with each other. It’s a habit he never really cared to notice, and everyone he spends time with is too concerned with whatever he’s running his mouth about to notice where and how he spreads his gangly limbs. He does it so often he starts running out of ways to subtly pull his arm back before Eddie notices. Eddie calls a problem he’s struggling with _the king of bullshit and lies_ and Richie very nearly cries trying to stifle what are threatening to be embarrassing and loud peals of laughter. Eddie’s phone vibrates again, and he texts back with a ferocious kind of typing that has Richie fearing for the structural integrity of the keyboard. When he throws a nosy look at the screen it says **To: Myra**. Eddie snaps his phone shut before Richie can read the text. He asks _do you have to be somewhere?_ and Eddie says _no_ with finality. His phone only buzzes one more time after. 

It takes close to two hours to correct some of the mistakes Eddie had been making, and another hour after that before some of the tension releases from Eddie’s shoulders and he slumps back into his seat, scrubbing his hands through his hair and over his face.

Through this fingers he says, “I’m gonna eat my own fucking hands if I have to write another number right now.”

Richie leans an elbow forward on the table, chin resting on his closed fist. “Want me to get you some salt or something? Or uhh…” He looks back at the bar over Eddie's curved shoulders, where they have all the little add ons for drinks, “They’ve got cinnamon. Wash it down with some soy milk?”

Richie doesn’t see it from behind Eddie’s hands, so there’s some room for interpretation, but he thinks he hears him huff out a laugh. He drops his hands to his lap, “I’d honestly rather suffer through it.” And then it’s Richie’s turn to huff a small laugh.

“Well, at least you’re not gonna completely fail this class so like, silver linings, right?”

Eddie nods and throws a brief and tentative smile at Richie. “Yeah I— Thanks, I owe you.” He looks back at the table and starts packing up his stuff, clearly serious about not writing any more numbers. Richie had honestly sort of wanted to see him try to eat his own hands.

Richie thinks, thinks. He thinks of nothing, there’s nothing he wants from Eddie. He’s always wanting, something more, something far from wherever he happens to be. It’s unsettling to feel settled _._

He says, “Nah, you don’t.” And then gets up, floats a hand over Eddie’s shoulder for a second, an almost goodbye that he’s sure Eddie doesn’t want from him. He grabs his black Jansport backpack from where he’d thrown it under the table, and the plate with the crumbs of his brownie. “There’s nothing you could offer me anyway, I already get everything I need from your mom.”

Eddie’s groan follows him out the door.

* * *

“Bevvyyyy,” Richie sticks his head through the cracked open door of her dorm, knocking on the frame of it. “Here’s Johnny!”

Her roommate Alice, who owns Mitch the Burmese Python, looks back at him, says, “She just left to go find you.” 

Richie nods, eyes her snake in its glass tank. He says, “Hey, what do you feed that thing?”

“Mice.”

“Live ones?”

“Yeah. Once a week.” She turns back to her desk — where she’s working on some incredibly detailed Naruto fan art — in dismissal.

Richie opens his mouth despite that, but she beats him to it.

“No you can’t come watch.”

He snaps his jaw shut with a click of his teeth. Damn.

He meets Bev in front of his dorm and she waves a little baggie of weed at him, over the pretence of subtlety at the very end of a hallway in a freshman college dormitory. 

She says, “Weeeeeed.”

And Richie says “Weeeeed,” back at her, and they go into his room. 

Bev immediately goes to his computer and opens iTunes (almost his entire library is LimeWire downloads, it’s almost impossible to navigate. His favourite song is green_day_creep and it’s a radio recording of Basket Case). She presses play on Louder Now — the whole album that he actually ripped from the CD onto his computer — and settles in next to Richie.

On the floor in front of his bed (because the one thing he refuses to do in his bed is spill bong water… again) they pass the lime green bong he got from a corner store back and forth. There’s a finesse to using it, because he cracked the tube a little so now you have to wrap a hand around it tight to prevent any smoke from leaking out. It does the job well enough, and he’s not spending forty dollars to replace a thing that mostly works.

Richie leans his head back against the bed and tries to blow smoke rings, that only results in making himself look like a fool in front of the coolest girl he knows. She laughs at him, and then blows a perfect smoke ring that encircles his face and disappears somewhere behind his head. 

He says, “Fucking how, for real.”

And Bev says, “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe she watched a youtube video of a forty-year-old southern man explaining how to do it.” You can find _anything_ on YouTube, holy shit. 

Richie wishes his arms had enough muscles to reach out and grab his laptop right now to watch that too. The new stuff Bev got them has him feeling more body high than any of the other weed they’ve smoked recently. 

Bev places the bong down between their legs and lets herself slide down the side of his bed frame so she’s lying spread eagle on the floor. The top of her head just touches the drawers tucked into the bed frame, and her feet just almost touch the opposite wall. Richie’s head falls back against the mattress, staring up at the ceiling.

“How’d your tutoring thing go?”

“Went fine. I could explain basic algebra to an ostrich like, that’s not the problem.”

“Was there a problem?”

“No?” His hands start to feel clammy and he wipes them on the fabric of his jeans. The noise of it is deafening, and it rubs his hands near raw, and he can’t stop. “Not like, a real problem.”

“Fake?”

“Like. A non-problem. Could be a problem. Just a… situation that’s circling around the drain of a problem.”

Bev laughs a little, and in his head the wave of it shifts and shimmers into something lower, something a little more hitching and breathless than Bev’s raspy sort of cackles. Something that echoed down at him from the sky, when he fell off his skateboard. 

He says, “How much do you think is too much to like. Text your boyfriend or girlfriend?”

She squints up at him, pale eyebrows lowered over dark eyes. “Depends.”

He places a hand over her eyes because the brown of them might swallow him whole right now. “On?” 

“Like. Over how much time, if they’re answering, uh. When the last time you talked was. I don’t know, why?”

“Like thirty, maybe forty texts over two hours? Without any responses.” His hand slides off from Bev’s eyes to the ground just to the side of her head. 

“Uhhhh… I wouldn’t. Like, I would’ve stopped after three, maybe. Why though? You got a clingy girlfriend we don’t know about?” She wraps his untied shoelace around her finger tightly, “Are you being a clingy girlfriend?”

“Just a hypothetical.”

“Alright…” The tip of her finger goes a little white in the circle of his dirty shoelace. “Dude, I can’t feel my finger at all.”

* * *

Somehow, and no one had consulted Richie on this, but Eddie becomes a staple in his friend group.

He sits with Stan and him at breakfast — they take turns telling Richie to shut up — and Eddie moves the salt shaker away from him in increments, until he has to lean over the whole table (and dips the hem of his shirt into his egg yolk) to get it back. He sits with Ben in the library for hours on silent hours. Ben always has something nice to say about him after, which is ridiculous, they don’t even fucking talk. What’s so great about hanging out with people in complete silence? Stan says he agrees, he’s a great study buddy. And then suddenly, Stan and Ben are talking about inside jokes and plans they’ve made with Eddie. Richie’s loathe to accept another study hang out invitation, so he doesn’t. He catches Bev laughing at a message on her Sidekick and after pestering her about secret boyfriends she says _it’s just Eddie, you know him_ and Richie hadn’t even known they had met.

It just means that now Richie’s been seeing him more often, too. Or, maybe he’d always been around that much, walking along the other side of the street on his way to class, or just a couple people in front of him in line at a coffee shop, passing just under his window while Richie leans out to have a couple surreptitious drags of a cigarette. Standing in a desolate corner of a school hall with a cell pressed to his ear and his fingers pressed into the corners of his eyes. Maybe he’d always been everywhere, the blonde blur in the corner of Richie’s eye, and Richie had just never seen him before, had let the polos and the cargo shorts blend into the sea of matching Abercrombie. Maybe now that he had seen him, he’d never be able to un-see him. 

* * *

Stan has them all — Bev, Ben, Eddie, Patty and Richie — over at his dorm, which he treats like they’re really guests in his home and not like they all already live in the same buildings of bug infested, communal student housing. He buys a couple of the corner store’s most eight-est dollar bottles of wine and makes them drink it out of glasses (though none of them are actual wine glasses) and also take their shoes off by the door, because he doesn’t want them to track mud into his room. That’s pointed at Richie and Bev specifically. 

He does pull out a bag of weed (because he’s started actually buying it now) but only him and Richie smoke any of it. Stan more than Richie, who for reasons unknown has the tolerance of a horse — if horses drank and smoked weed. 

Richie sits on Stan’s desk chair and re-arranges his, perfectly all right angles organized desk, in bits and pieces when Stan’s not looking over at him. He fully expects Stan to force him to come back here and rearrange it when he does notice — and he will notice. Patty and Stan sit on his bed, shoulders touching, talking about whatever nerd shit it is they have to talk about. Bev spins the computer chair Richie’s on, so he’s facing the room, and sits down on the floor in front of him, including him in the circle of her Eddie and Ben — who are both sitting leaning up against the far wall of Stan’s room. Ben’s telling them all a story from one of the halloweekend parties they (including Bev and Richie, who both blacked out) went to. It stars a couple girls in the same costume causing absolute chaos amongst the wasted frat bros, who, on a good day wouldn’t be able to tell apart the women they’re trying to sleep with. It ends with a couple of them with their eyebrows shaved off, and their porn search histories revealed. Greg Stocker has a raging foot fetish, apparently. Eddie laughs hard, snorting into his Fred Flintstone mug of wine.

Bev says, “His girlfriend dumped him for that, I heard.”

“Couldn’t handle a little foot fetish?” Richie wiggles his toes at Bev, who tickles the bottom of his foot and he retreats with a completely dignified squeak.

“No! Because he’d never asked her to like, look at her feet or whatever and she confronted him about it and he said he thought her feet were ugly!” 

Ben near chokes on his wine, waves his hand in front of his face like he’s trying to clear the laughter from the air so he can swallow. “I didn’t know about that!”

Richie, doing his douchebag voice says, “Babe! I’m not with you because of your feet, I’m with you in _spite_ of them!”

And Bev says back in a nasal voice, “But you’re supposed to want _all_ of me!” 

They all laugh at the fate of poor Greg, straight through the vibrations of one phone call to Eddie’s cell. When Bev moves on to some MySpace drama, Richie watches Eddie pull his Razr out of his pocket, look at the screen for barely a second and then drop it face down onto the floor beside him. It rings out its last few vibrations there, and then picks right back up — louder against the linoleum floor — when Patty joins their conversation with some insider knowledge about… Well, Richie’s not sure. He forgot to listen to who took who off their top eight. Eddie ignores the phone better than Richie does.

Stan leans forward off the bed, feet on the ground and elbows on his knees, into Eddie’s space. Richie hears, through the ear that isn’t trying to tune back in to Bev’s story, Stan say _everything okay?_ and Eddie says _it’s fine just… Myra._ Stan hums in a way that means he knows more than he’s saying.

They drift through conversations in different configurations, Eddie and Bev talk about One Tree Hill for a long time. Ben, Stan and Richie tell Patty about the kid from their grade twelve science class who it turns out, was just arrested for trying to kill his neighbour with a shovel. She in turn tells them about the guy who went to her old school — somewhere in Ohio — who’d catch pigeons around the field and take them home as pets. Bev and Patty drift closer together and talk about a couple mutual friends they have, make wine tipsy plans to meet up for coffee and shit talk the boys in the room — they raise their voices for the last part and fall apart in giggles over it. Richie jumps over to Stan’s bed and elbows him in the side and wiggles his eyebrows at him while Bev and Patty are talking. Stan rolls his eyes at him but then gives him one of those rare closed-eye Stan smiles, and Richie knocks their shoulders together. Ben refills everyone’s glasses and the second bottle of wine is gone. 

Ben and Eddie are still sitting against the wall where they’d been at the beginning of the night. Eddie had been telling some stories about his high school years in DC, all of them starring his friends Bill and Mike, who’d stayed there. He talks about Mike and the farm he grew up on, the party they had in the unused barn at the back of the lot where they nearly burned down the whole building — hay, apparently, is flammable. He tells them about the time Bill flipped over the front of his BMX and cracked his two front teeth so they formed a little V at the front this mouth for a couple weeks before he got them fixed. Ben laughs extra hard at this one, sharing his own BMX-tooth-cracking story. 

Stan asks how long he’s known them, and Eddie thinks for a second, says _I don’t fucking know, forever._ Stan, Bev, Ben and Richie say _yeah._ They share their own stories, some running parallel to Eddie’s childhood stories, some to Patty’s. Both of them enthusiastically let the rest of them know of their own experiences. Everyone had a park, a quarry, the LA river, where they hung out and got muddy, and drunk for the first time. Everyone’s friends had one set of wheels. Eddie says Mike had a light blue pickup with one orange door, because a bully had smashed it in with a baseball bat and they had to get it replaced. Patty had a car — and didn’t drink in high school — so she was DD for two years straight. When Bev says Richie drove them around, and Richie says _yeah, in my babe mobile_ Eddie says _I can’t believe any of you got in a car with him_. 

They drift through conversations about drama, and school clubs, and the teachers that got fired for being drunk at work, or driving their car into the flag pole out front, or for dating a student, and about all the shitty clothing they all wore, JNCO jeans, velcro shoes, bright yellow rain coats, about embarrassing first times getting drunk, throwing up from it, first kisses and boyfriends and girlfriends, screaming in laughter the whole way through.

To Eddie, Ben says, “Hey you’re still with your high school girlfriend right?” Eddie nods an affirmation, “how’re things? You seemed kind of stressed at the library the other day.”

“Things are fine,” Eddie sighs, tilts his head back against the wall, “she just likes to know where I am, y’know? What I’m doing.” His phone vibrates once against his leg. 

Stan, from next to Richie on the bed says, “All the time?”

Eddie shrugs. “She worries.” He upturns his mug against his mouth, scrunches his eyebrows together and pulls it away, looking up into the — Richie assumes — empty mug. “We have any more wine?”

Bev hands the bottle over from where she’d been holding onto it for herself and Patty. She stays close when he takes it from her, leaning up against Ben. Patty stretches her legs out into the space Bev left. 

She says, “My ex used to do that when I went to Florida over the summers. Call me every day. He always thought I was like,” she drinks some more wine out of the little Winnie the Pooh glass Stan had brought with him from his parents house, “gonna forget about him, or cheat on him.”

“That’s not,” Eddie says, “I mean, that’s awful, but it’s not really like what Myra’s—”

“Oh no, I didn’t mean to imply that it was, sorry—”

“No, it’s totally okay I just. It’s just different.”

“Yeah, okay. Yeah.”

Eddie nods, “Sorry about your shitty boyfriend,” he says. His phone vibrates against the linoleum floor again.

* * *

Rarely does Richie see Eddie one-on-one, the way the rest of his friends seem to be hanging out with him. He’d helped him re-learn basic algebra for his midterm that one time, and then forgotten why they had even met up. He’d circled back around near every moment of that night at the cafe, the unsettling ease with which Richie felt like he could talk to him, the familiarity of their interactions, but he’d managed in all of that to forget that the end goal had been Eddie passing a test. And then he’d sort of forgotten about the whole thing altogether.

Richie gets out of bed at half past eleven at night, shoves his sock-less feet into his slip on Vans and drags himself out of the dorm building and into the California night air. It’s colder now, noticeably, and the Emily the Strange hoodie he stole from Bev does only just enough to keep him warm against the breeze. He does a loop around the top border of campus, circling as far away from his building as he can and straying out into the residential streets just past the TV building that he spends most of his time in. The streets wander here as aimlessly as he does, never intersecting at a right angle and taking turns at pointless and unexpected locations. 

He turns back, and then suddenly, behind what he thinks is the psychology building, he gets tired. More tired than he’s been in days. He takes a couple of the stairs up to the main paths through campus, and then turns and sits down on the step he’s standing on, without really even thinking about it. He’ll have a cigarette, and then he’ll keep walking, and probably be fully awake by the time he gets back to his dorm anyway. Or he’ll fall asleep right here on these stairs. There’s nothing on him worth stealing anyway, his Zune stayed dead in his room, and no one wants his shitty Samsung slide with a T9 keyboard. 

He leans his head against the railing, and forces past the coughs he feels threatening to come up when he takes too long a drag off the end of his cigarette, ignores the ash that falls onto his pants and smudges into the denim. He just listens to the sounds of his clothing shifting, quietly and strangely reverberating through the railing and into his ear. 

Halfway through his cigarette the noise of it stops, and the sudden absence of that gentle hum makes him realize how deafening it had actually become. He opens his eyes and looks down the set of stairs, and then twists to look back up. His hand shields his eyes against the motion sensor light on the back of the building, trying to recognize the figure silhouetted against it with their hand on the railing. Their shoulder blocks the light a couple stairs down, and Richie can pick out their features more clearly. Straight nose, shining round eyes. 

Eddie says, “Fuck’re you doing out here?”

Richie stares at him for a couple seconds, the part of his brain that registers images and noises and converts that information into something he can analyze and respond to is playing tv static at the front of his brain. He hums and turns back around, leaning his head back against the railing where it was, to ground himself back to the rumble of the earth. “Not like you’re not out here too, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“Don’t call me that,” the bottom of his pant leg brushes against Richie’s thigh when he walks down to the step Richie’s sitting on, “Seriously. How are you always where I am?” And then his elbow brushes against Richie’s when he sits down next to him.

“Well, I don’t know, maybe you’re always where I am, stalker.” He squints over at him, the loose line of his shoulders where he’s bent over his knees.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

Richie says, “How,” and then scrubs a hand under his nose, a nervous tic he’d developed at some point, “How’d the exam go?”

“Oh, yeah. Good. B minus.” 

Richie taps the outside of his dirty checkered Vans against Eddie’s equally scuffed white Nikes, “Fuckin’ math whiz over here, look at you.” Eddie huffs out a small laugh at that. Richie continues, “And all thanks to me, algebra master.”

Eddie says, “If your head gets any bigger, it’ll explode.”

“That’s all the brain I got in there, you wouldn’t get it.”

“Pretty sure you replaced eighty percent of your brain mass with pure undeserved ego. At this point you might as well just get rid of it, it’s functionally useless.”

Richie snorts out loud, hides his smile in his shoulder away from Eddie. Eddie’s hand crunches around the brown paper envelope he’s holding when he brings the back of his hand up and across his mouth. 

“What’s that?”

“Hm?”

Richie points at the envelope in his hands, something boxy in the crumpled paper. Eddie lets out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a laugh.

“My girlfriend mak— or well, uh— I send her these videos bi-weekly.”

Richie’s never known if bi-weekly meant every other week or twice a week. Neither is significantly less weird than the other in this situation, which is just overall deeply strange. He doesn’t clarify that point though. Instead: “Hm. Sex tapes?” 

“No! Why the fuck would I tell you about them if I was sending sex tapes. Also that’s disgusting! And who even knows what post office creep could open and watch— no, oh God, I can’t even think about that. They’re not sex tapes.”

“The lady doth protest a fucking lot.”

“That’s not the quote, also, shut up. They’re just updates. What’s been going on, stuff like that.”

“Doesn’t she call you like, every day? Can’t you just tell her then?”

“Yeah but, she wants to be able to see me I guess.”

“Ah,” Richie puts a hand to his chest. “Young love.”

Eddie twists the package between his hands, looking right through it and into something else that Richie isn’t privy to. “Yeah.”

“Does she send you her own videos?”

“No.” Eddie stops fiddling with it, lets it hang loosely between his fingers, just barely holding on to the very corner of the envelope.

“Why?” 

“I don’t— I talk to her every day, I don’t need an update.” He looks at his G-Shock. “Fuck, they close in like fifteen minutes.” He stands up and brushes the back of his pants off, takes the last few steps down. At the bottom he looks back at Richie. “Hope you freeze to death out here.” 

Richie mimes shivering, arms wrapped around himself. 

“Not joking,” Eddie says, “bye.”

Richie puts the dead cigarette to his lips, and lets Eddie get away with having the last line. Just this once.

* * *

No one had consulted Richie on this either but, he thinks Eddie’s becoming his friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the black parade album really came out on october 23rd 2006 which fits into the timeline of this so ofc i had to write 1k words about it!


	4. i never stray too far from the sidewalk

“Can you just— Can you fucking turn down the music?”

“We’ve been over this, driver chooses tunes and volume.”

“It’s a road hazard! You’re not gonna hear if someone honks at you, or a siren or— and it’s fucking awful! You’re gonna lose your hearing and then what are you gonna do for the rest of your life? Do you know how expensive hearing aids are? And for _this_?”

“It’s not that serious Eds— Stop fucking turning the music down, you can do what you want when you take over in— Stop! Let go of the fucking controls Eddie.”

“No, I won’t. Let go of me! I’m not even trying to turn the music off, I just want it quieter!”

“I know you’re a man of delicate constitution Eds but The Used is a full volume kind of band and— stop struggling, I’m just _sayi_ —”

“Richie watch out!”

Of course he’s not looking at the fucking road, why would he look at the road? He’s only driving on the fucking interstate. 

Richie lets go of Eddie, where they’d been childishly grappling over the volume dial, and looks out the front window at the looming, suddenly huge shape of the truck in front of them and—

Record scratch, freeze frame. 

You’re probably wondering how he ended up here, and you wouldn’t be wrong to. Eddie himself is still unclear on some of the details, so let’s all catch up to speed.

During the first several weeks of school Eddie was repeatedly assaulted by one Richie Tozier, at parties, on his walk home, at breakfast, every public space suddenly haunted by the gangly MySpace-emo-wannabe presence of the greatest nuisance to enter Eddie’s life. We’re not starting the story here, but this is technically where the story starts, it’s important to note. 

He swore when Richie had crashed into him on his fucking skateboard that he really would never see him again. He could do it, be friends with Stan in spaces Richie doesn’t set foot in — the library, campus cafes, his own dorm. Now all holy spaces to Eddie. And it was important, you see, to keep Stan asfriend, because outside of him the only friends Eddie had managed to acquire were the people who talked to him in his classes only to copy off his notes — and he wouldn’t want to be friends with them even if they _did_ want to keep him around of his own merits.

But Stan started inviting him to more stuff, study sessions and breakfasts and hanging out at his dorm and Richie was always, _always_ there somehow, and had blinders on for everything but annoying the ever-loving shit out of Eddie. 

So it starts there, technically. But it also starts here — classes end on Friday, and while he’s on the phone with Myra, saying _I’ll see you in two weeks, I still have exams and then I promised my mom I’d spend a couple days with her_ he runs into Stan, who waves at him and tilts his head in a considerate way. Eddie knows he’ll just stand there a polite distance away and wait for Eddie to finish his phone call before he comes to talk to him, and that’s kind of the last thing he wants to make him do. 

He cuts off Myra’s retort of _I know your mom’s important to you honey, I already called her and we decided we’d do dinner at yours the nightyou get back and then you two wi—_ and says _oh, I see my prof I have to catch up and ask him something about the exam, I’ll call you later_. And then he hangs up before she has a chance to reply. Of course she fucking called his mother before she called him. 

“Hey, Stan!”

“Eddie, hey. You didn’t have to hang up.” 

“It’s fine.” He was going to have to call Myra back later, regardless of how soon he hung up on her now. And anyway, he needed a couple minutes to process that his mother had already planned out his whole winter break. He’ll have to start arguing his days off to see Bill and Mike now, before he even leaves LA. In any case, a distraction was in order. To Stan, he says, “What’s up?”

“My last class just ended. You got any left?”

Eddie shakes his head, “I just have to go hand in an essay at my prof’s office, today’s the cut off.”

“Okay, you headed…” He points back over his own shoulder in question.

“Yeah.” It’s the opposite direction of where Stan had been walking.

“Alright, I won’t like, keep you from that. Oh,” Stan snaps his fingers, not at Eddie, just in this way he does when he remembers he wanted to say something, like he’s getting himself back on track. “There’s a party tonight, my friend just told me about it. You interested in coming?”

Myra had initially called to tell him she still wanted another tape before they came back home for break, even if he’d be back in DC in two weeks. He’d been fighting it, too, he’s busy and he doesn’t even want to send these to begin with, doesn’t like knowing that they’re on VHS because his mother refuses to buy a DVD player — _they stopped making good movies long before they invented CDs, I’m not going to spend any money on this drivel_ — and is intending to scrapbook these one day for the wedding she’s had planned for Eddie and Myra since they were barely even walking — personality-less pink lumps, ready for forming by Sonia Kaspbrak’s expert manipulations. 

He’d have to film and send the thing out tonight, or really early tomorrow, otherwise it would interfere with his study plans. Or, if he films it after his exams, it’ll get there after he does and Myra and his mother would be upset with him. And anyway, he hates parties. 

He’s also afraid of rejecting any invitation from the one small cluster of people — with one notable exception — that he’s managed to get along with. 

A couple of the people he met during his first couple days had tired quickly of his neuroses, and the fanny pack he brought around only until the second week of school when it turned out that the mockery from high school didn’t just magically end because they were in a different educational system. They’re still all the same people. Stan had been understanding in a way few other people had been, and carried around his own bottle of hand sanitizer too. And none of them — including Richie, miraculously — ever questioned the sanitizer, and the polysporin and bandaids and antihistamines he keeps in any of his many cargo short pockets, or the full minute he spends washing his hands any time they come in from the outdoors, either. And they never did that fake friendly thing that kids in middle school used to do to him. You know, where they egg you on and pretend they’re laughing along with you but they’re not, really.

So he says, “Yeah I’ll come by, I don’t know how long I can stay though.”

“No pressure, man!” Stan claps him on the shoulder, and Eddie doesn’t even have to the fight the urge to flinch, it just doesn’t come. “I’ll text you the details when I know more.”

Eddie nods, and they pass each other to continue with their days. Eddie looks at his G-Shock and finds he doesn’t have time to waste in handing in this paper if he’s going to film and send this tape, get started on some studying _and_ go to the party. 

* * *

In this whole mess, Eddie makes only one discernible mistake — the rest is on Richie’s shoulders. And you know what they say about hind sight being twenty-twenty, so it was easy to say this now but. 

In retrospect, he should’ve filmed the tape as soon as he got back to his dorm. 

He’d been feeling petty about the whole thing, and Myra’s slew of texts after they’d hung up telling him to _remember to film the tape tonight so you don’t forget about it later! can’t wait to watch it!!_ and _don’t stress too much about your exams, i know you want to keep your scholarship but too much stress can give you stomach ulcers, and recurring migraines! not to mention wrinkles! remember to moisturize and take your medicine_ and _its okay if you don't do perfectly on these exams anyway you know you can always go back home, take some time off._

_And then you’ll be closer to me._

So sue him, he doesn’t like being told what to do every second of every day. When he gets back to his dorm and looks at the shitty camcorder balanced on top of the shitty little TV with a built in VCR — that he doesn’t even use for anything but these videos for Myra (but had to buy with his own money anyway) — he thinks. Fuck it.

He sits at his desk and reviews first few weeks’ worth of material of one of his more difficult classes. The exam isn’t for another week almost, but he likes to get an early start on stuff, and if he can get through the first two chapters of the textbook tonight while he’s still in school mode, he can take tomorrow off to finally relax for a second. 

He’d had it all scheduled out, which he was good at — the scheduling, that is, the anxious planning. It’s the follow through he’s worse at. 

He does in the end get through all he had set aside to review today, but it takes him longer than expected. The concepts are from early in the semester and he’s a bit rusty on some of the details. He passes the time he had set aside for himself to get done by, by several hours. He’s not the type of person to accept a failure in any capacity, and pushes through until suddenly it’s half past nine, and he has to rush to shower. 

He’s wrestling his hair into something resembling a neat part when he catches his reflection in the curved screen of the little TV and he remembers about the fucking tape for Myra. But it’s too late, and if he wants to get to bed at a reasonable hour — _remember, your sleep is important, it helps recover your immune system and keeps you alert the next day_ — he should leave for the party now, and then come back and film the tape. That would be okay, as long as he was back here by 11:30 at the latest. 

His roommate, Josh — who’s messy, and kind of a douche, but a douche with a well stocked mini fridge of beer — lends him a tallboy of Budweiser (a prop, so that no one pesters him about drinking) and he’s on his way. 

* * *

The party is, as all others he’s been to, loud, and smoky with the sweet-sour earthy scent of weed, and sticky with sweat and beer and — god knows what else. He can’t think about it or he’ll break out in hives right then and there. 

He does the obligatory party small talk with the couple people he knows from class. It’s a lot of, yeah so glad classes are done, I don’t know what I’m going to do for exams either haha, are you going home for break? Oh, you’re from LA? Cool. No, I’m from DC. Haha, yeah I’ll tell Bush you say hi.

And then, from behind him, “Eddie!”

He turns around, and there, just coming out onto the porch — which is the only place in this whole fucking house where Eddie can breathe — are Richie and Bev. Richie’s too long arms are flung out wide in excitement with the sort of recklessness of someone who forgets they take up real physical space. He looks like a labradoodle, dopey and curly and floppy in a way that’s both endearing and kind of slobbery. Despite himself, Eddie feels a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. 

“How are you already this drunk, Richie?” 

Bev waves at him excitedly from behind Richie, and comes up to give him one of her half hugs. He appreciates the way she deals in physical affection. It’s halfhearted in a sort of charming way, an afterthought in all the ways she wants to remind people that she does, actually, hold affection for them, despite all the ways in which she can seem aloof and detached. She presses their cheeks together even though they’re barely touching anywhere else — that lopsided excitement she carries with her, always half there, half onto whatever else she’s thinking about. Into Eddie’s ear she says, _I’m just gonna go say hi to a friend real quick,_ and disappears behind him.

Richie sways back into his line of sight. 

“I’m not drunk—” Oh that is such a huge fucking lie, “I’m not _that_ drunk, I’m just happy. Can’t I be happy to see you?” Richie leans against the porch railing and tilts his head at Eddie. His fringe falls into his eyes and he flicks his head to shift it back into place effortlessly. The porch light hits the planes of his face in a way that makes him look sharper than he usually does, cheekbones and chin pointy and chiseled. It’s disarming.

“You—” But he doesn’t know where to go with that. Why would Richie be happy to see him? He doesn’t want to ask that. “How was your last day of classes?”

“I don’t wanna talk about classes. They’re over, I never wanna think again.” From seemingly nowhere he produces a perfectly cylindrical joint, and holds it up by the filtered end between them, like its a precious flower. Even Richie looks surprised at his immaculate conception of the thing. He hangs it from his lips, and makes eye contact with Eddie over the hand he’s lifted to light it with, “You wanna join me in the not thinking?” 

“No uh,” Eddie looks away, anxious about the smoke, and the having to say out loud that he can’t be around smoke, that his mom’s placebos — or this one specifically — continue to work over three thousand miles, “I can’t be around,” he coughs at the first tendrils of smoke from the joint. Fuck. “I have asthma I can’t be around—”

“Oh! Shit dude, here,” suddenly Eddie’s behind manhandled by Richie’s huge hands, spun in a semi circle so they’ve swapped places. “Now you’re downwind of me.” He grins around the joint still hanging from his teeth.

“That might not be enough.” The back of his throat tickles distantly, but not more than his shoulders itch under the warmth of Richie’s palms

“I’ll blow away from you, don’t worry. You’re safety is our top priority here at,” he chances a glance up at the house, where frats usually have their name plastered in tacky displays. This one doesn’t. “uh… I Eta Pi.”

Eddie laughs against his wishes. Richie blinks down at him through a toothy grin, and slides his hands off Eddie’s shoulders to pull the joint out of his mouth. He blows the smoke back over his own shoulder, well away from Eddie. 

“What’re you drinkin’ Eds?”

“Don’t call…” What’s the point, in telling him not to call him Eds, Richie’s got the memory of a goldfish and the insistence of an angry llama at a petting zoo. He holds up the can of Bud. “Just a beer.” Actually it’s gonna bother him, if he doesn’t correct him. “And don’t call me Eds.”

Predictably, Richie ignores him. “Just one?”

“Yeah, I don’t feel like getting wasted tonight.” He imagines what Myra would say if he sent her a drunk tape, and that pettiness stirs inside him again. For the briefest second, he considers stealing some more alcohol from the messy kitchen.

Richie blows a long stream of smoke over his shoulder again. “Lame. Would some peer pressure help?”

“No.” 

“Okay.” He turns to half sit on the porch railing, and looks up at Eddie with a smile that hits Eddie in the same way his laugh did that time Richie wiped out on his skateboard behind Rieber. Eddie joins him there with a hovered hand at his shoulder when Richie overestimates and leans too far back, defenceless above the dark drop into the un-illuminated backyard. And soon Ben, Stan and Patty come out to the porch to join them, too.

* * *

Stan and Patty stay out on the porch when Richie and Ben head inside to dance — or try to siphon some alcohol from the kitchen (or both) — so that Eddie doesn’t have to go into the stench and mess of the house. Patty rests a dark arm around Stan’s shoulders loosely, since she’s just tall enough that she can lean on him and make a joke of it. Unlike Eddie, who’s always detested the height jokes, Stan just looks up at her through a smile and the metric ton of weed smoke that hangs around him at parties — even when he’s careful to smoke far enough from Eddie that he doesn’t feel the urge to cough. 

Bev eventually jumps up the porch steps from behind Eddie — he’d forgotten she’d disappeared immediately to say hi to a mysterious friend — and barrels straight into Patty’s arms. They hug it out with the swaying joy of drunk eighteen year olds. They make a funny pair, Patty in her blue jeans under brown knee high boots, and a flowy elegant strapless top, contrasted with Bev, in blue zebra print skinny jeans and a black shirt layered under a short hoodie that’s got tiny glittery skull-bats and stripes and hearts printed all over it (it’s a lot to take in). Most mysteriously, in Eddie’s opinion, is the studded checkered belt she’s got pulled on over the tank top— it just seems completely useless. 

He looks out at all of them, the mismatch from Eddie’s own blend-in clothing of thrifted polos and cargo pants (to replace his fanny packs), to Stan’s knit sweaters and artfully distressed jeans and converse, Patty’s candid-photo-of-a-celebrity-leaving-a-Starbucks outfits, perfectly pulled together, and Bev, dressed to compete with even the most famous of MySpace scene queens. He thinks that he’s incredibly lucky to have found these friends. 

After all, he’d moved to the West Coast on the closest he’d ever gotten to a spontaneous whim. He’d only even really applied because Bill was thinking about LA for a while. Eddie’s mom had gotten so mad at just the _thought_ of him applying that she’d spent weeks alternating dizzyingly between crying and yelling at him, and then giving him a pointed silent treatment over it. It didn’t even help when he reminded her that he wasn’t actually serious about it. It came to a head when she’d hid his SAT prep stuff (and all of his cumulative assignments) in the hopes he wouldn’t pass — that she’d torpedo his chance at getting into any school just to keep him close to home, close to her. He’d decided then he’d go to LA, even when Bill chose to stay in DC. 

And then after the disaster of the first couple friends he made here — who all reminded him of the people who bullied him and Bill and Mike in high school. They were only drawn to him because he was wearing the brands they wanted him to be wearing (if they ever found out it was all thrifted…) and because he was already writing notes in classes from the first week, when they were all too hungover on newly found freedom to bother taking their own anyway. 

Stan smiles at him through weed-heavy eyelids like he knows what he’s thinking. Eddie tips the beer can at him and smiles back.

He finishes his beer when his G-Shock reads 11:15 PM, and heads out not long after, taking the long route along the house so he doesn’t have to go through the mess inside. He passes one couple making out only several feet away from someone violently throwing up against the siding of the house and wonders if he would’ve fared better inside after all. 

* * *

Back in his dorm he sets up the camcorder on top of the TV. The reflection that stares back at him from the screen looks a bit ruffled from the wind outside, a bit tanner than he usually looks in December. He likes it, the swoop of his hair when it’s not perfectly parted to hide all his cowlicks. 

He goes over to his mirror anyway, and brushes his hair down with some gel, puts on his only pair of khakis, and spins the computer chair to face the camera, sitting across from his desk. It’s the most casual way he can think to do this. Something about sitting on his bed — even having it in frame. It’s too intimate. 

He says straight to camera, “Hey Myra, we see each other in a couple weeks, and uh…” looks around the room. What is there to say even, after that. “I miss you, I guess.” Fuck.

He gets up and turns the camera off, deletes that footage and rewinds the VHS so it records over that. He sits back down. 

“Hey Myra, school ended today. Can’t wait to see you in a couple weeks, after exams, uh. I miss you, I hope you do well on yours, good luck with your studying. Here’s something to get you through that, I hope.” He reaches over to his desk where he keeps the poetry compilation books she’d given him before they went their separate ways — with post it notes on all the pages of the ones she wanted him to read to her. This one’s Shakespeare, as are many of her favourites. He reads, “If I should think of love, I’d think of you, your arms uplifted, tying your hair in plaits above—”

His phone vibrates with a message on his desk, then another, then another. He stifles a groan and goes to look at Myra’s messages. She’s checking to see if he’s in bed probably, or to see if he sent the tape, or to tell him that she talked to his mom and they both agree that he often gets sick this time of year so he should go to the doctor and get some cold and flu medicine, and cough drops if they have them, just in case. So he doesn’t come home sick, because he’s only home for so long and Myra wants to be able to see him, and she only ever really wants him to be safe and healthy. Although if he did come home sick it would give his mother a reason to coddle him and keep him locked in his room, always incapacitated in a blanket prison and just an arms reach away. She’d love that. 

The preview screen says **Message From: 213-260-8043** , which is not Myra, probably. Unless she got an LA phone, and that has implications he doesn’t want to think about.

**From: 213-260-8043 11:30**

_whyd u leaveeeee_

**From: 213-260-8043 11:30**

_come backk_

**From: 213-260-8043 11:30**

_edfdddiiieeee_

Eddie squints down at his phone. He read once that aphasia is a symptom of a stroke. He feels at his chest, and does a mental check of all the other signs he knows of. He doesn’t feel any numbness, or dizziness, or anything. When he smiles at himself in the mirror both sides of his mouth lift up same as usual. Still. 

He looks back at the messages.

**To: 213-260-8043 11:32**

_Who is this_

He has a sinking feeling he can already guess who it is though.

**From: 213-260-8043 11:32**

_it ricvhe e !!!!,!_

He assumes it’s supposed to say Richie, who he figured it was. He wonders who gave him his phone number, and if it’s even worth it at this point to get mad at them for that.

**To: 213-260-8043 11:33**

_Oh. Sorry i had to leave_

He sets down the phone on the desk, and goes through the motions of rewinding the tape and deleting the old footage, which is now mostly just him looking at his phone and thinking he’s having a stroke. He sits back down again, and his phone buzzes again. 

The recording of him on the screen smiles, small and a little exasperated, but he closes his eyes at the same time, and he doesn’t get to see it. He flips his phone open.

**From: 213-260-8043 11:33**

_its the end of sem,!!!! ! u shd b party7ing!!!!_

Holy fuck, he’d been tipsy when Eddie had seen him, teetering into crossfaded by the time he left. It shouldn’t surprise him that he’s reached that drunk desperation to force everyone around you to have as good a time as you’re having, but he is, especially at how fast Richie’s reached it.

**To: 213-260-8043 11:33**

_Jesus calm down. I’ll see you soon probably anyway_ ****

**From: 213-260-8043 11:34**

_eddddiiiiie44ieieieiie_

**From: 213-260-8043 11:36**

_come backl !!!_

He turns the phone off, resets the camera and VCR (fucking again) and sits back down again. This is going to be the last fucking time he starts this, so help him god. 

“Hey Myra, school ended today. Can’t wait to see you in a couple weeks, after exams, uh. I hope you do well on yours, good luck with your studying. Here’s something to get you through that, I hope.” The book is already resting in his lap this time, and he thinks she’ll feel touched at that, which is good. He’s doing these for her sake if nothing else, and it’d be pointless if she was disappointed in the results. “If I should think of love, I’d think of you, your arms uplifted, tying your hair in plaits above, the lyre shape of your arms and shoulders, the soft curve of your winding head. No melody is sweeter, nor could Orpheus so have bewitched. I think of this, and all my universe becomes perfection. But were you in my arms, dear love, the happiness would take my breath away, no thought could match that ecstasy, no song encompass it, no other worlds. If I should think of love, I'd think of you.” 

Under this sonnet, is a Walt Whitman. Eddie catches sight of the line, _of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand._

He blinks at the poem, and then sets the book down on his desk. He always does the poem first and hopes that that’ll satisfy whatever it is that forces her to ask for these, and then moves on to the more benign retellings of his days. He wouldn’t care to hear this about himself, he doesn’t know why she would. He posts a lot of it on MySpace anyway (more his livejournal, which is the only account Myra doesn’t have the password to — or the name, for that matter. She doesn’t know about it at all).

“In other news, I got a couple papers back, nothing lower than an eighty seven, which is good I think, considering I’m taking some second year courses. LA is still surprisingly warm. I know it’s supposed to be warm but it’s still weird. I thought I’d hate it but I don’t, somehow. I don’t even— I mean, I wanna see the snow, because it doesn’t feel like christmas without it, but I don’t actually miss winter either.” Myra hates the winter too, because everyone has to squish inside in overheated spaces and breathe all that recycled air. She’ll get this, he thinks. “I miss you.” 

He does, in some ways. She’s never cruel to him, and that has always been true. She may be stifling sometimes, she may be too invested in all the aspects of his life — both those that he likes to keep private and those he doesn’t care to — but it’s because she cares. He knows that. Even if she was more susceptible to the manipulations of their mothers — both of them were at times, and Eddie was still victim to some of his upbringing but. It was different in the end, how they grew up around all that stifling pressure of their overprotective parents. 

And it must be hard on her anyway, that he moved so far. They’d gotten used to each other. Their mothers are best friends (his mom’s only friend, in fact), and they’d grown up together, pushed into friendship by every conceivable boring adult affair they were forced to attend but too bored to stick around for and instead shuffled off to the other side of the room to play pretend, or cards when they were a little older, or sneaking into the computer room (the computer child protected, of course, even by the end of high school). He’s never known a life where Myra wasn’t just next to him, asking about his day. 

He opens his mouth to channel this into something kind to say — because she doesn’t deserve to have him snap at her all the time — but there’s a loud knock on his door, and then the doorknob’s turning — did he lock it? Is he getting robbed? Is Josh home early with a girl and is going to sexile him from his dorm? Or worse, see him filming this video for Myra? Is it the RA, here to bust him for all the beer in the dorm — oh fuck he doesn’t want to be around for that, it’s not even his, he can’t risk the partial scholarship, taking the fall for someone else’s crimes.

In the end, it’s only this — and he’s only a little thankful that this is the outcome and not any of the other options that passed through his brain — Richie tumbles into his room, unsteady on his feet and overcompensating, trying to appear more sober than he is. He says, “Eds! I’m bringing the party to you!” 

How does he even know where his dorm is?

Eddie shushes him, and jumps up from his computer desk to lean around Richie and shut the door behind him. He walks further into the room, gazelle legs carrying him in quick steps from the door to the desk, to the mini fridge at the other end of the room by the sink, where he gets distracted opening the vanity mirror and looking at Eddie’s stock of pills — antihistamines, ibuprofen and Advil (and Tylenol) and melatonin and Tums. He keeps the far more specific medications his mother sent with him under his bed. He’d wanted to throw them out but something in him nagged that maybe, maybe he could get shingles, or pancreatitis, or asbestosis (he doesn’t trust the residence halls much), chicken (or small!) pox. 

“How is this bringing the party to me, only you came.”

Richie looks at him over his shoulder. “What more do you want Eds? I am the fuckin’ party.” He grabs one of the pill bottles. “What is all this? Are you okay, dude?”

Eddie grabs it out of his hand and puts it back and shuts the cabinet door. “Just a precaution, there’s lots of things I could get sick with so I’m prepared. Everyone should have this, also,” he smacks Richie’s hands when he reaches for the electric toothbrush he has on the sink. “Stop touching other people’s stuff.”

Richie’s hands fly up in faux surrender, and then he spins away to look in the mini fridge, gets bored of that and shuts it too hard and goes to inspect Eddie’s bookshelf. 

“How’d you find my room?”

“Asked!” He pulls out a book and tosses it behind him, barely even glancing at the cover. Thank god it only lands on Eddie’s bed.

“Who?” He has distant ideas about stopping Richie, and if he gets close to anything valuable on this spree Eddie will step in, but this is honestly pretty low risk behaviour. Unless he chucks a book through the fucking window. 

“Downstairs, at the front desk.” He picks out another book, reads the cover — Wuthering Heights — and flips it over so Eddie can see, looks at him like _you read this?_ Eddie doesn’t answer, so Richie puts the book back on the shelf.

“And they just told you? At the front desk?”

Richie looks over and nods at him with enough enthusiasm to disorient him a little, and he tries to play it off as if he was just trying to move on from the bookshelf to the CD rack on the corner of his desk.

“Couldn’t resist my charm.”

Eddie scoffs. “Okay, how’d you know which building.”

“Uh…” Richie pulls out a CD from the shelf, flips it back to the track listing, “took a shot. Hey, you got any good music or is it all just—?” He flaps the CD he’s holding at Eddie. It’s Train. Eddie grabs that away from him too, feeling like he’s babysitting a bratty neighbourhood kid again. 

“Train _is_ good music,” he shoves it back into the shelf while Richie pulls out another at random (Simon & Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence) and wolf whistles. 

“Okay, grandpa Eddie.”

“Fucking—” He throws his hands up at Richie, like _what are you twelve?_ Richie slides the CD back into the rack, and shrugs his shoulders back at Eddie, in what is probably supposed to mean _at least I’m aging backwards and not fifty years old_ but Eddie chooses to read as _yes, I am a petulant child and I’m here to fuck up your dorm._

Since they’re already at his desk, and he’s inspected the rest of his dorm anyway, Richie nudges over his computer chair and moves to the table top, to look over the stacks of notebooks and loose-leaf lined paper and pencils shaved down to nubs. He touches all of it, flipping through absentmindedly, moving it around however he wants to. Eddie’s not particularly organized himself, as long as he can get his room clean he’s always been of the opinion that organization can fall a little to the wayside, but this is an excessive sort of mess. 

Richie picks up the book of love poems and squints at the title. Eddie knows Richie wears glasses mostly through the couple photos Ben showed him of all of them in high school, and the one time he saw him wearing them late at night. He figures whatever contacts he wears to parties (if any) don’t account for reading. Or he’s just so crossfaded he actually can’t focus on it. Eddie snatches it out of his hands anyway, and tosses it on his bed with the other books behind him. 

When he turns back to face him Richie’s looking at him funny. Eddie tries to beat him to whatever drunk nonsense is about to come out of his mouth.

“Are you quite done messing up my r—”

But of course, _tries_ is the operative word. Richie says over him, “Your hair looks weird.” 

“Weird? Fuck you, what do you mean weird, w—” Richie reaches a hand up and tugs slender fingers through Eddie’s gel crisp hair. He cringes a bit at the texture, but keeps going anyway, and Eddie just lets him, arms raised mid-air in an aborted attempt to move Richie away.

“It looks better natural, when it’s wavy.”

“Gee, thanks Richie. I’ll keep your opinion in mind next time I style my hair.”

“No d— if you like it like this you should do that, I just.” He detangles his hand from Eddie’s hair, now successfully and permanently messed up, “Sorry.” He wipes the gel off on his skinny jeans. His pupils are huge when he looks back up at Eddie.

“What have you had tonight, man?”

“Uh, just booze.”

“I watched you smoke weed.”

“Oh yeah,” he laughs, wheezy and light, “weed too.”

“Anything else?”

“Don’t think so. Why? You worried about me?” He — well Eddie figures he’s probably trying to do a seductive, old hollywood blink at him, but he’s _too_ slow at it, and sort of out of time, so he just winks out of sync at Eddie a couple times. He’s so fucked up.

“What are you doing here, Richie?”

Richie sways a bit back on his heels, and then further forward into Eddie’s space than he had been. His smile is spacey, like he’s disconnected from it.

“I don’t know man, I don’t.” He shrugs, and swallows, and glances around Eddie’s room. “I don’t know. Wanted to see you.” 

“You wanted to see me.”

“Yeah.” 

Eddie nods at him, and the motion of that forces Richie’s eyes back over to him. His face is slack with some— something. Richie’s face is never expressionless, always running through his entire thought process externally. It worries Eddie, and he leans closer to get a better look at his eyes, like maybe if he calculates the exact degree to which his eyes are dilated he can figure out if he took something else. If it was cocaine Richie’s probably in the clear if he doesn’t do any more tonight, but it’ll do wonders for the inside of his nose even after only one use (and that’s assuming it’s only one) — and all that is assuming it’s cocaine at all. It could be ecstasy, which is scarier. Eddie’s heard stories of liver failure and seizures and people jumping off roofs the next day because they think they’ll never feel happiness again after the high of it and—

Richie swallows again — doesn’t ecstasy give you cotton mouth? — and his breath comes out in this shaky little exhale. Eddie’s thinking about heart palpitations, about his airways closing up, why would that even happen — if it does, is he gonna have to preform an emergency tracheotomy? is— 

The very tips of Richie’s fingers trail a line up Eddie’s jaw, and curl around the back of his ear, and Eddie’s thinking _okay, what—_ but all thought statics out fully when Richie slides his lips against Eddie’s. The angle’s a bit off, and Eddie’s not thinking at all — head still TV static — when he corrects them, tilts his head up so that he catches Richie’s bottom lip between his own. 

Richie’s hair tickles a little where it brushes up against Eddie’s forehead, and his nose presses into Eddie’s cheek sort of weird, and his lips are kind of chapped and it feels so, so good to be kissed and held so fucking gently — wanted. 

Eddie feels Richie’s breath shudder out against his lips and hears the low rumble of his voice when he says _Eds_ into the space between them, and his eyes snap open and — Fuck. Oh, fuck.

He jerks back, and realizes only when he has to untangle his fingers from Richie’s shirt that he’d even grabbed on to it at all. Richie’s a little slower on the uptake, and his hands slide out of Eddie’s hair and the whole way down the flat of his chest before he catches up and reels back, too. 

“Shit, Eddie. Sorr—” his eyes are wide and shiny with panic. He claps a hand over his mouth. “Fuck.” 

Richie darts out of Eddie’s dorm, and Eddie wants the time to process this, to think it over and then decide to never think about it or bring it up again, and he wants to do that alone. He also can’t let Richie go back to his own dorm in this state — drunk and high, about to vomit (is it because of the substances, or because of Eddie? Is that a hole he wants to go down?) and in a res hall he might not even know. Oh fuck, what if he doesn’t know where the washrooms are, where’s he going to vomit? 

Eddie sprints out after him.

Thankfully, Richie found the washroom — Eddie can hear him retching through the door — and he steps in after him, cautious. 

“Richie?” He hears Richie spit and then groan, and Eddie grimaces. “Hey man, do you—” He was gonna ask if he wanted water, but that’s a stupid question. “I’m gonna go get you some water okay? Just stay there.” 

He darts back over to his room to grab a cup, and then back to the washroom, terrified that Richie will leave and he’ll end up passed out — or worse — God knows where. When he walks back in Richie’s sitting on the floor of the stall — that’s so fucking disgusting, college boys can’t aim for shit — and he’s flushed the toilet, as far as Eddie can tell. Eddie fills the cup up in the sink.

Over the rush of the water, Richie says, “Eddie man, you don’t have to… like, I’m good. I’ll be up in a jiff. Ain’t a thang.”

“You’re fucked up dude, I’m not letting you— Just,” he turns to hand Richie the cup of water, who’s careful where he puts his hand on the cup when he takes it from Eddie’s hand — the first thing Eddie’s ever seen him do carefully. “Drink.”

“Do you really—” he cuts himself off to take a couple cautious sips of water — the second thing now, that Eddie’s seen Richie do carefully, “You think I’m fucked up?” 

Eddie leans against the stall door, and looks down at Richie, all curled in on himself and shaking. He thinks Richie read that different than what he meant, and it feels— well. “You’ve had a lot to drink.” 

Richie nods, and takes another couple sips of water.

“Thanks for the water, Eds. Thanks for,” he exhales harshly, and shakes his head, and then shoves it between his knees, and Eddie figures he’s done talking. He’s also probably done being awake, so Eddie grabs the cup off the floor — he’s just gonna throw that out in the garbage before they leave, it’ll never be clean enough to drink out of after touching the communal washroom floor — and wraps a hand in Richie’s armpit and tugs at him gently, more an indication to get up than it is actually forcing him. He’s not letting him sleep on the floor here. He’s also not— Richie looks so small right now, and Eddie might be distantly mad at him for the shit he just pulled, but he’ll yell at him tomorrow when he doesn’t look so pathetic. 

“Come on, I’ll take you back to your dorm, where are you?” Richie lets himself get pulled up, helping Eddie in this effort, but only in thought. He’s too weak after all the throwing up, and too disoriented from all the alcohol to actually be of any use to himself.

“You don’t have to, I can find my way back.” But even as Richie says it he stumbles over his feet a little, and Eddie grabs him by the elbow to correct his trajectory. “I am a woodsman, I can track the stars and winds and… and animal feces to find my way back to my dorm.”

“Alright woodsman, I’ll believe it when I see it. Are you nearby?”

“Hedrick Hall.”

That’s literally right next to his residence, thank god. And thank god too that Richie just lets himself get pulled along back to his dorm without comment — not that there’s not inane slurred mumbles on his end the whole way there, _i want churros_ and _we should go to the beach right now_ and _wait shit where’s Stan._ He offers up his keys and student card helpfully when they get to the building so Eddie can let them in. Mumbles _sixth floor,_ when Eddie leans him up against the wall of the elevator, and then leads them to his own dorm door, squinting at all of them the whole way down but not telling Eddie the actual number of it. Eddie assumes it’s because he doesn’t actually know it, and only finds his way back by smell, or echo location, or— Oh, the poster he’s pasted on his front door. It’s of a band Eddie doesn’t recognize, and the name of it looks like a red mess of animal scratches and not actual words. 

Richie beelines to his bed, pushed into the far corner of his room. Eddie drops his keys and student card on the desk — there’s only one of each piece of furniture. Eddie’s glad he doesn’t have to deal with a roommate right now. When he looks back at Richie to make sure he’s not falling asleep on his back so that he conveniently chokes if he vomits in his sleep — he’s not, he’s splayed on his stomach, somehow shirtless, with an arm flung out off the side of the bed — he’s actually already _fully_ asleep. 

Eddie passes him to leave, but Richie left his fucking shoes on, and despite the absolute disaster zone his room is Eddie isn’t a fucking animal. For his own sake he can’t let Richie sleep in his shoes. He pulls them off — god bless slip ons — and sets them down at the foot of the bed. And then he leaves. 

* * *

He wakes up at seven thirty in the morning — barely aware he’d even fallen asleep — to the incessant ringing of his phone right next to his ear. He flips it open without looking at it, and shoves it between his ear and the pillow, eyes still closed. 

“Eddie-bear, you didn’t call me last night…”

“Sorry Myra, something…” He stifles a yawn so she doesn’t asking him about his sleeping patterns, if he’s feeling lethargic, how often, “came up.”

“You could’ve texted me…” there’s a silence in which he’s supposed to apologize profusely, but he’s in that half dream state where he thinks he says _sorry I didn’t mean to, I’ll make it up to you_ but actually says nothing. “Anyway… did you send the tape express or regular? ‘Cause you know it would get here too late if you sent it regular.”

That wakes him up, and he swings his head around to the TV, and the camera and the fucking VHS and thinks _oh_ _shit and fucking balls._

“Yeah, of course I did. I’ve always sent them express why wouldn’t I send this one express?” Fucking express shipping, fucking FedEx, fucking Myra and his mom refusing to let him live or study or date on his own time. 

“No need to get mad at me.”

“Sorry.” The sorry’s so automatic he’s surprised he doesn’t call her mommy too. 

There’s no time to dwell on that thought. Eddie flies out of bed and ejects the tape, shoves it into one of the envelopes he bought for this specific purpose, and shoves himself into something resembling a daytime outfit. During his whole mad dash he has his phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear and listens to Myra tell him about K-Fed cleaning up his look (and she always thought it was so unfair that people were so harsh on him, he’s cleaning his act up and Britney’s out there partying in slinky dresses as if she doesn’t have _children_ ), and how Paris Hilton wants four kids by the time she’s thirty, and those poor poor children, to grow up with a mother like that, but at least she’s family oriented, unlike Jennifer Anniston, who just broke up with Vince Vaughn, and she’s not getting any younger.

Eddie cuts her off when she gets started on Lindsay Lohan (which usually takes ages, she hates her passionately for reasons unknown). “Myra, sorry, I gotta go to the library I’m meeting someone to proofread an essay for me.”

“You can always ask me to do that.”

“You don’t know the material, it’s fine. I’ll call you later, okay?” 

“Okay. I love you.”

“Talk to you later.” 

He pulls the phone away from his ear, and her tinny voice says, “Say it back, Eddie.”

He doesn’t have time to argue her on it this time, and he has even less time to spend thinking about why he fights it so hard usually, anyway. “I love you.”

He hangs up and sprints out of the room like a bat out of hell straight to the FedEx ship centre just off campus. They tell him _this won’t send until Monday,_ and he says _no I know, it’s fine. Can I send it express?_ and they charge him $33 for it.

* * *

He gets back to his dorm, ready to fucking rest, finally. He shoves the stuff on his desk into what distantly resembles piles, and reaches over to the top of the TV where the camcorder’s balanced, so he can delete the video from last night and stop taking up room on the — incredibly limited — memory card. When he selects the icon for the video in the gallery it scrolls through some stills of the footage quickly and— oh. 

He presses play, as if maybe what he knows happened didn’t actually happen. The camera’s from ’95, maybe it died at the most opportune moment. Maybe for once God, or Buddha, or Bill Gates, or anyone looked down at him and thought he deserved a break. He watches it in fast forward.

At the six minute mark, Richie leans down. And Eddie kisses him back.

* * *

In another way, it started here: Richie avoiding him on his skateboard with a ridiculous bow, to prove a point — that he’s finally mastered the art of not crashing into moving objects — and getting so distracted in his own joy that he fell, and then did nothing but lie there and laugh up at the sky. 

And Eddie looked at him down on the pavement and thought of all the germs and dog piss that had to have collected there over the years, and also inexplicably, that Richie looked like someone he could’ve been friends with when they were little — someone he would’ve made snow angels with. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is from because of you by kelly clarkson bc its an eddie chapter n he wouldnt listen to any emo shit. 
> 
> also i should clarify that i don't go to uni in the states so i'm just using my school exam schedule so school ends early december n then there's exams for like 2.5 weeks ish
> 
> sorry it took a minute! i wrote this whole thing in richie's POV n then realized like. it would just make more sense to do it from eddie's perspective so i had to rewrite it. n also i didn't want anyone to think eddie like really intentionally cheated on myra. he's not that guy
> 
> lemme know if u clock any typos!


	5. i gotta get outta here and i'm begging you, i'm begging you, i'm begging you to be my escape

Richie flickers into existence to an unholy banging at his dorm door. First his head, in the little crevice between the edge of his pillow and the hard line of his wall, and then his hand where it’s shoved under the pillow next to his head, and then his legs, dangling off the opposite end of the bed. He tangles his fingers into his pillow case and tugs the pillow over his head, tucks himself firmly into the corner where his mattress meets the wall, the only place in his room where it’s dark and quiet. 

The banging doesn’t stop, not then, not when he croaks a quiet _Richie’s not available leave a message at the beep_ , not when he pathetically tries to throw a shoe at the door to get it to stop, and it only reaches half way there.

“Richie, I know you’re in there answer the fucking door!” 

It sounds like Eddie’s voice. Richie stumbles out of bed and grimaces at the taste in his mouth, and the sight of his room, most of his clothes from last night tossed around like a hurricane had passed through. At least there’s no vomit anywhere. He opens the door for Eddie and only then realizes he’s only in his boxers. And then another realization hits him — Eddie’s never been to his dorm before, and Richie has no idea how he’d know where to find him.

“How do you know where my dorm is?”

“I need to borrow your car— Wait, what?”

“What do you mean what, you’ve never been to my dorm.”

The blur that represents Eddie does something with his face that Richie can’t discern without his glasses, and then seems to realize that his arm is still raised and drops it to his side. 

“Uh— Stan told me…” He’s still looking at him in a way that, while Richie can’t actually see what he looks like, he can feel the energy it gives off. It’s a general kind of confusion, mixed with what he thinks is relief. There’s nuance to the Eddie Blur. 

“Okay.” That makes sense, Stan and Eddie text. “What did you say you needed?”

“Your car.” There’s a general urgent shiftiness to Eddie, backdropped against the plain white of the hallway. Richie thinks he can see him vibrate at a low frequency. 

“Okay. Actually, hold on I can’t even see you. Come in. Lemme just…” Richie leads himself back into his room dragging a hand along the walls so he doesn’t run into anything. He grabs his glasses from the nightstand and sits back down on the edge of the bed, duvet pulled over his lap. He motions for Eddie to sit wherever, and he picks his way across the disaster zone with a grimace. On the desk Richie’s alarm clock reads 2:00 P.M. “So start again. You need my car?”

“Yeah I— So, you know how I have to send Myra those VHS tapes every other week? The life updates?" 

Richie nods. Of course he knows about them, and not one bit of it doesn't confuse him. There’s so much untapped comedic potential in the whole situation though, and Richie’s entirely obsessed with it.

"What does my car have to do with your sex tapes?"

Eddie flushes a deep red, "They're not fucking sex tapes, Richie. Look, I sent her the wrong tape and she'll freak out if she sees it, and I couldn’t get it back from the FedEx centre because someone had already come to get it when I realized, so can you just give me the keys to your shitmobile so I can go intercept it before she gets it?"

"Eddie what VHS tape, pray tell, did you send her that she can't see?"

Eddie's flush deepens around his eyes, squinted at Richie like he’s trying to read his thoughts. Richie can’t figure out why, he’s so fucking hungover he can barely sit up, let alone have a critical thought.

“Uh…" He breaks eye contact with Richie, glances at his still bare chest, and then his poster covered wall. “A… sex tape.”

Richie gapes at him. “You sent a sex tape? Who did you film a sex tape with? Did you meet someone at the party last— you were there right?” He thinks he remembers seeing Eddie at the party last night, and then… he doesn’t remember what happened between the foggy image of the back porch and the only slightly less foggy image of himself sitting on the stairs talking to a girl — blonde? in a jean skirt maybe? — and then again. Nothing. He remembers dancing to Akon with — someone? By himself? He has no idea. He doesn’t remember seeing Eddie at any point again, so he must’ve gone off with someone. 

Richie claps a hand over his mouth to hide some of his glee. He feels bad for the Ithaca girlfriend, but he has to admit he loves the drama of it, only in the way someone who got too invested in their mom’s soap operas to hide away from their own school trauma did.

Eddie squints at him. “Uh… No one.”

“No one? She’d get mad at a mastur—”

“No one you would know! Can I just borrow your car?” He steels himself visibly, and through a clenched jaw says, “Please?” 

“I’ll drive you.”

“No, I mean— Not— You don’t have to, and—”

“I’m not like, trying to do you a favour by driving you. It’s my car I’m not just gonna lend it to you to drive to Ithaca. I’m coming with.” Eddie looks like he’s going to argue, “Look man, either I come with, or you find someone else’s car.” And then he doesn’t look like he’s gonna argue anymore.

“Okay… Okay that’s fair. How fast can you be ready?”

“Like. I mean when do we have to leave? I still have to get dressed and go to my parents’ and pick up the car, and also I had like, a metric fuck ton of booze last night I might still be kinda drunk.” Despite the fact that physically he feels like death warmed up, he’s strangely zen about the whole affair— as zen as he can be when someone he’s pretty sure fully hates him just barged into his room and begged to take his car on a cross country high speed chase with a VHS sex tape. 

“I sent it express—” fuck, “I mean it’s the cheap express, but it’ll still be there by Tuesday at the latest. We have to leave today, it takes three days at _least_ to drive cross country. That’s if we’re counting stopping for gas and food, and I’m not letting us drive through the night because, I mean do you know how many car accidents happen as a result of sleep deprivation? I don’t even wanna fucking think about it! And god knows what kind of weather they have right now on the East coast I mean, it’s December it could be fine but it could also be a nightmare of snow and ice and I can’t check that, not reliably! And it’s not like I can just call Myra up and ask! She’ll know I’m heading up there and I can’t have her find out I’m headed up there I can’t s—.”

“Eddie, dude, breathe.” Eddie takes a shaky breath and shuts his jaw with a click of his teeth. Richie’s afraid he’ll pass out in all his hyper speed talking. “We’ll leave today, no problem. I can be ready by like, five? Is that okay?” 

“Yeah that’s—” Eddie rubs his hands over his flushed face. “Thanks Richie. Yeah. Fuck.”

Richie leans forward off his bed and places his hands on Eddie’s hunched shoulders. “Eddie, on God, we’re gonna get your sex tape back and save this relationship.” 

Maybe it’s not his place to think this — but he’s always been kind of nosey, a result of the aforementioned soap operas and his inability to hold focus or sit still — but maybe the easiest way out of the whole affair is to just let her see the tape. But Eddie’s a better man than he is, probably, and maybe despite the way he looks at his phone when he sees a text from her, he does actually love her and just has a funny way of showing it. 

Eddie peeks through his hands at Richie’s crooked toothy grin, and then jumps up from the chair, knocking Richie aside with the momentum. “Okay, okay, I’m gonna—” He points to Richie’s door, not even fully closed, “I’m gonna go pack some stuff and— I’ll meet you, here? Later?”

“Yeah, give me your number and I’ll text you when I’m ready.”

“You…” Eddie’s eyes flit from Richie’s face to his nightstand where his phone is plugged in, and then at Richie’s shoes lined up neatly — strange — at the end of his bed, “uh… you already have my number.”

“What? Shut up, no I don’t.” He stretches to his night stand and picks up his phone and… Oh, God. “Holy fuck.” 

**Missed Calls (27)**

When had he gotten all these messages, what the fuck. He slides the phone up and scrolls through his received folder, while Eddie slowly creeps away from him toward the door.

**From: Stanley the Manley 11:59 P.M.**

_Where the fuckare u_

**From: Beverly Mosh 12:00 A.M.**

_riahie whr r u ?_

**From: Beverly Mosh 12:00 A.M.**

_srsly where d u go_

**From: Stanley the Manley 12:10 A.M.**

_Richie wtf_

**From: Ben Handsome 12:12 A.M.**

_richie were worried where r u_

**From: Stanley the Manley 12:36 A.M.**

_Answer your phone Dick_

**From: Beverly Mosh 1:00 A.M.**

_rich answr ur phon_

**From: Ben Handsome 1:10 A.M.**

_we just wanna kno ur ok_

**From: Stanley the Manley 1:34 A.M.**

_you better be dead otherwise I'm going to FUCKING kill you_

Scattered through the messages from his friends he zeroes in on the messages from a new contact.

**From: Efdie Spaggheti 11:32**

_Who is this_

**From: Efdie Spaggheti 11:33**

_Oh, Sorry i had to leave_

**From: Efdie Spaggheti 11:33**

_Jesus calm down. I’ll see you soon probably_

Richie doesn’t even want to know what messages he sent. He really… He can’t know. He doesn’t even open the sent folder, just empties the whole thing from the selection menu, and resolves to forget about the whole thing — and never mix alcohol again. 

From his doorway Eddie says, “Okay, I’ll see you at five!” And ducks out before Richie can say anything back. 

* * *

Richie texts back Stan, Bev and Ben to apologize for disappearing on them last night (and for whatever else he may have done before or after that). Bev and Ben are glad he’s okay — Bev is a bit pissed, naturally. Stan barges into his dorm twenty minutes after he sends the text, fuming.

“What the _fuck,_ Richard.” 

Richie’s half dressed in his room, packing some basics into his biggest backpack. He lifts the shirt he was about to stuff into the bag up to his chest to cover up a little, feeling like he’s about to get torn to shreds — if he could have his nipples covered for that he’d be grateful.

“I— Stan, I’m sorry man. I honestly don’t remember. Like, I don’t fucking remember anything.”

Stan closes his eyes, breathes in through his nose for four, out through his mouth for eight, and then he says, “Richie… you are an absolute fuck.”

When he was little Richie did this thing — and he didn’t understand why everyone would freak out about it until much, much later — where he’d go up into the hills (not the Hills, just the hills, the closest trail he could find) at random, often on school days. This is before he had a cellphone, still just barely above five feet tall and legally blind with knobby twig legs, that could barely carry him across a lawn without tripping him, let alone on an extended hike. He doesn’t remember, to this day, how he ever got to the hills, or why he chose to do that, just that something in him kept saying _get out, get out, get high enough that you can see the end of all this and aim for that._

Then, once, in high school, the four of them had gone to a party in Silver Lake (which was a familiar neighbourhood), and Richie had gone out for a smoke alone, and then called them the next morning from Huntington Beach (not a familiar neighbourhood by any stretch of the term). He doesn’t know how he ended up there, and the rest of them know even less. 

The summer after high school, feeling half out of his skin after a night without sleep, he’d gotten into his car and headed east. His parents woke up at seven and he was already gone, not a single thing out of place in his room, no note — no Richie, no car. They called all his friends, they called him, they called the police — _it’s not a missing persons case until it’s been twenty four hours, sorry ma’am._

Richie drove out to just pas the Arizona border, and sat in a Sonic with all the doors open and his legs stretched out into the pavement, just staring out at the flat sandy horizon. His milkshake melted in his hand and his legs itched in a way that made him think he could run all the way to— where. Anywhere. 

And then, legs and arms back in the car, he thought maybe he could drive to the Grand Canyon, he was kind of close. 

He ran out of gas— he doesn’t even remember where. A man in a pick up found him just as the sun was rising, and gave him a canister of gasoline and a hand rolled cigarette when he saw how badly Richie’s hands were shaking (with fear, he thought. With the thought that he almost got somewhere and didn’t. With the urge to use the gas to drive from here to the Canyon, the red rocks of Sedona, the mountains of Colorado, the endlessness of America beyond that). He used it to drive home.

Technically, he was still grounded for that. 

In the face of Stan’s wrath Richie is but a gummy bear, and Stan is the seven year old kid who eats all the tiny limbs before he eats the torso. He doesn’t want to be the gummy bear.

“I know. I’m sorry. I give you permission to put a leash on me.” Stan doesn’t falter in his meditation breaths, keeps his eyes closed. “I’m serious, I’m really sorry.”

Stan opens his eyes then, immediately zeroes in on the open bag on Richie’s bad, and the mess of clothes spilling out of it.

Richie’s still clutching the shirt to his chest, and he tugs it on to save some dignity in all this, maybe. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“Mhmm.”

“Eddie asked to borrow my car for uh—” shit, does Stan know about the tapes? Would Eddie want him to share that he’s got a sex tape on the loose? That he’s got one at all? “He wants to surprise his girlfriend in Ithaca, so I’m going with him.”

“You have an exam on Thursday.”

“Uh—” huh, an interesting new development. “I’ll be back by then.” 

And if he’s not, what’s one failed class? What’s two, even? In the grand scheme of things. He’s still in LA, right? The city of dreams, right? What’s any of it for anyway? He’s already made it. 

“Okay.” Stan goes to his sink and packs Richie’s toothbrush in a ziplock bag with his toothpaste, and throws it straight into Richie’s open bag. “Don’t die. Keep me posted.”

“Sure.”

Stan stays to help him pack — Richie packs a shirt, and ripped jeans, and a couple CDs, Stan throws in his deodorant, and contact solution, and socks and underwear. Richie throws in a baggie of weed, Stan takes it out and confiscates half of it, _payment for the heart attack last night._ That’s fair. 

* * *

Richie picks his car up from his parents’, and shoots them a text message that he needs to cart some stuff around the greater Los Angeles area for a project, and hopes that they won’t ask any further questions on that. If they ever find out he’s crossing state lines in that car again they’re really gonna make him move back home and confiscate the car and all his electronics, like they did last summer. 

Like a parolee, his thirteen year sentence of _no car, no electronics, be home by eleven every night, don’t you ever fucking even think of doing that again_ was reduced to just a couple months when he moved out — on good behaviour — for university. All that could be revoked if he violated the terms of his parole, which were really simply, _do not fucking leave the state again especially without telling us and even if you do tell us we’ll hunt you down._

So he has to stay in the state until he’s twenty one, _technically_. That being said, he wasn’t too much of a delinquent as a young-un, inexplicable childhood hikes and a couple drunk romps (and the several calls home from school when he just would _not shut up_ ) not withstanding. He’s allowed one completely intentional deviation.

He texts Eddie that he’s parked on the other side of campus, because it was the first spot he could find and he's not gonna play tag with the next free parking spot to open around here, so Eddie could walk on over if he needed the car so bad. 

He hangs a cigarette out his mouth, leaves it unlit, because when he reaches over to the passenger door pocket to grab the lighter he knows is in there he catches sight of all the garbage pooling in the corners of the car. And the centre of the car. And on the seats. And in the doors.

The worst of it — the fast food containers, and empty gum packs that he spits the chewed up ones back into sometimes, and the receipts (oh god the _receipts) —_ he throws into a paper McDonalds take out bag, which he drops into the floor space behind the driver’s seat. There’s some scattered old ash on the centre console that he sweeps onto the floor with it. 

Actually, when he’s done, it’s looking like a relatively decent car. It’s not clean the way his dads is, or the way it was after Stan would clean it during a particularly rough hangover, but it’s like. It’s totally fine, especially with the windows cranked, you can barely smell the accumulated smell of stale cigarette smoke in an enclosed, hot and completely unventilated space. 

He finally lights the cigarette that’s been hanging out his mouth, and pulls the CDs he’d had in the glove compartment out — I Am the Movie, Louder Now, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Lies for the Liars, Everything in Transit, Page Avenue, Dear Diary My Teen Angst Has a Body Count, …Is A Real Boy — holy shit he forgot he had some of these. He’d gone and downloaded them off the internet and everything. What a fool. He shoves the Motion City Soundtrack album into the CD slot and skips to the third track right away. The first two songs are good, but they’re no The Future Freaks Me Out. 

He’s wiping some errant ash that fell onto his shirt in a moment of high octane head banging when Eddie rolls up to the window, backpack slung over his shoulder and rounded with all he’s shoved in there, and a plastic bag in his hand. He drops the plastic onto the passenger seat through the open window. Richie pops the trunk for him before he can ask for it. He’s nothing if not a good vehicular host. 

Eddie comes back around the car and through the window again, opens the plastic bag and pulls out a whole box of garbage bags which he tosses at Richie. He pulls out for himself a bottle of windex and a paper towel roll. 

“What is this?”

“What do you mean what is this? I’m cleaning.” He opens the door finally, and waves his hand in front of his face as if the smoke from Richie’s cigarette is even sticking around all that much. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it.” Eddie sprays some windex along the length of the dashboard and the top of the passenger side door. 

“I thought we were in a rush.” 

“We are so, could you please—” Eddie shoos Richie out of his own car, which he’s now apparently commandeered, “Throw out the stuff in your backseat, I don’t even want to imagine the new life that’s growing from the mould on that food.” 

“I’m not a monster,” Richie leans in through the rear door to throw the — still mostly contained — mess into the black plastic bag Eddie handed him, “Or a millionaire for that matter. There’s no food left in this, I don’t waste.”

“Good, so then this should be quick,” Eddie coughs into his elbow. “Jesus, can you put out the cigarette? I’m gonna have a fucking asthma attack.”

“Asth—” A thought blinks on in the front room of his mind, letters coming on in the burnt out neon sign of memories from last night, one that says _you’ve been here before, you knew this already_. He says, “Shit, sorry, I forgot,” and tosses it out behind him into the road. 

“Do you have seat covers?”

“It’s not that dirty Eddie, oh my God.”

“They’re fabric seats, and you smoke in here. The chemicals from cigarettes can stick around for months, and even combine with chemicals in the air to create carcinogens, not to mention it smells bad and I don’t want all my clothing to smell like an ash tray.” Eddie’s moved on now to cleaning the front windows of the car — holy shit were those really that dirty?

“No, I don’t have seat covers but we can stop at the first gas station we see and you can get something there, I don’t care. It’s your money.” Does he really care about cigarette smoke? No, it’s already in his lungs. Does he care about the carcinogens? Also no, he’ll just air them out. Does he want a pink cheetah print seat cover? Yeah, kind of.

“We can’t just,” Eddie grunts a little where he stretches across the centre console to get the far edges of the windshield without rounding the car, “stop at every gas station we see, we have to stick to a schedule.”

“There’s a schedule? Who schedules a road trip?”

“Who doesn— It’s not like this is a road trip for fun, we have to make it there on time so. No unscheduled stops.”

“What if I have to pee?”

“Hold it.”

“What if I’m… bleeding?” He knows Eddie carries band-aids around with him in one of his cargo short pockets, so maybe this is a stupid one to ask. He’d probably just stitch Richie up while he’s driving. 

“Bleed out. I’ll let your parents know which highway they can find your body on.”

“That’s dark man, you’d let me die on the side of the road?”

“If you don’t hurry up with the cleaning I might kill you before we get to any roads.”

Eddie’s already moved on to cleaning the back window, and Richie still has to reach under both the seats to dig up the most hidden of the garbage he’d thrown back here God knows when. He picks up the pace, just in case Eddie really is feeling homicidal. 

* * *

Eddie printed a five page document from Google Maps on how best to get to Ithaca.

“We’re taking a more southern route, which is a little longer so we’ll have to do a bit more driving than on the route through Colorado.”

“Why don’t we take the faster route?” This is the second time since Eddie’s asked Richie to borrow his car that he’s delayed them leaving. Not that it didn’t take Richie a couple hours to collect the pieces of his hungover brain and shove them into this car, but it’s not his relationship on the line. And yet, Eddie insists on deep cleaning the car and then taking the longer route?

“Have you ever driven in the snow?”

Oh. Richie hadn’t. He opens his mouth to lie and say of course he has, it snows every winter in California this one’s just an outlier, and then has the most vivid image of his car upside down in a snowbank on the side of the road in Illinois (he’d seen a pretty bad car crash the one winter he’d spent with his grandparents in Chicago, it haunts him still). 

Eddie humphs triumphantly, so Richie rips the directions out of his hands to get a look at them since he’s on the first driving shift. He hopes Eddie gets at least one paper cut. 

They get stuck in traffic on the 405, literally just as they’re leaving campus, and then merging onto the 10. All the way through downtown LA to El Monte they’re treated to the classic, red stop light skyline and the dulcet tones of car honks, and that one guy who sticks his whole fucking head out the car window just to yell at the sea of cars to, _move fucking goddammit I’m the most important person in the whole universe, and if I could monster-truck drive over you I would_.

Eddie flips through the AM radio stations trying to find the most reliable traffic reports, like maybe if they turn off at the next exit and take Washington the whole length of the city they’d get somewhere faster — or at any speed at all. It’s rush-hour, and it may be a Saturday, but that means nothing in the city of Angels.  Richie settles in, his left foot pulled up onto the seat and knee resting against the door where the window’s open, his fingers hang from the bottom of the steering wheel — which is functionally useless, considering they’re stopped fully and have been for a while, and will be for the next while until he can move another inch forward. 

It doesn’t stop Eddie from reminding him to keep his hands at ten and two, to sit the fuck up, to merge into a further right lane in case they want to turn off the high— oh shit, no, that exit’s just as congested as the highway. What the fuck is wrong with LA.

What the fuck, indeed. 

* * *

Richie reaches for the volume dial at the at the first muffled power chord of The Rock Show — he brought Take off Your Pants and Jacket from his dorm (sort of by accident, it was in the wrong case) and turns it way the fuck up, halfway to ear bleedingly loud. Before he’s even pulled his hand back Eddie’s reached over and resolutely hit the off button for the whole system, and they’re treated to the musical stylings of his car radio staticking out at full, mind shattering volume. 

Richie turns it back on, says, “It’s my fucking car, I chose the tunes,” while the CD skips roughly with the treatment they’re giving it. Richie can imagine the exact shapes of the scratches, and he knows it’ll skip right through the first verse now. It tunes back in at _summer at the warped tour_ and Eddie yells, 

“At least fucking turn it down!”

“No can do sweets! This is the only volume to listen to music at!”

And it’s like he doesn’t understand that at all, because Eddie still reaches over for the dial. This time Richie smacks his hand away from it, and Eddie punches him in the shoulder in retaliation and reaches for the dial again, so Richie pinches the skin of his hand between his thumb and forefinger. They go back and forth like children over the volume dial, slapping at the other’s hands, yelling _fucking stop_ and _turn down the music shithead!_ for two choruses.

Eddie takes the opportunity to turn down the music when Richie takes a pause to merge into the far left lane. The camaro behind them honks at him, and Eddie throws up an aggressive middle finger between the seats, yells, e _at a bag of dicks!_ over his shoulder. 

Richie squints at him, “Are you road raging at him, for me?”

“Fuck that guy and his shitty fucking car, this is more important than whatever douchebag shit he has to do.”

Richie bites back a gleeful grin. “You don’t know his life dude, maybe he’s… rushing to see the birth of his child.”

“Well if someone was gonna FedEx that baby immediately after it was born I’d say, okay, but the thing’s staying in the hospital so. Fuck him.” From the radio Tom DeLonge croons _it’s hard to wake up, when the shades have been pulled shut._

“Oh and fuck this guy too,” Eddie says, and leans over to turn the volume dial almost all the way down, “boo fucking hoo man, your life is so hard.” He turns to Richie, “do you listen to any music that’s actually good?”

Richie lets him switch the song because they’re finally moving, like moving for real enough that he feels like he should sit up a bit, put both feet on the ground, maybe even wrap one whole hand around the steering wheel. 

Eddie relaxes back into his seat when the volume’s down, and Tom’s moved on to lighter topics, that is roller coasters and that sort of longing that most people forget after middle school. Blink-182 has a market on that, the feeling that they wrote music specifically for you, age thirteen. Or what you thought you were at thirteen, because Richie at least sure wasn’t dating, or driving, or going to any amusement parks (motion sickness). 

A thirteen year old Richie is sitting on the very corner of his childhood bed, very seriously staring off into middle-distance, converse untied with the laces muddy and spilling all over the place. He says _Ricky dude_ (because this is when he thought Ricky was a cooler shortened version of Richard than Richie) _you can’t turn back after this, I swear if you chicken out again I’m jumping through time to purple nurple you._

* * *

He takes the exit at San Bernardino, the sun setting behind Eddie’s enthusiastic tirade against Los Angeles traffic. It’s just a bit too late into the sunset to be romantic anymore, the shrubbery turned grey brown and smudgy along one side of the curving high way, and all these deep, deep colourless pits along the other side of it, pointy edges of the hills turned to dull knives. He keeps getting blinded by cars headed in the other direction with their high beams on. He keeps thinking he’s gonna blink through another set of them and open his eyes to the bright white sun of Venice, just another weird dream after a wild night out.

He blinks away another set of lights. Ahead the road curves out of the shrubby hills surrounding the city. The lights of the billboards fade on as they’re driving past, meaning it’s finally getting officially dark (because the advertisers decide when it’s night time). _Injured in a work related accident?_ comes into view first, a man who could’ve been a movie villain in the 50s smiles from it. _HomeTown Buffet Dinner, $10 Steak Every Night_ in yellow and green. _Sunland Ford_ illegibly full with information, and dark, dark blue. 

The second they pass the Hesperia City Limits sign it feels like the horizon pulls away from them, the edge of the earth moving from towering right next to the highway, to far and foggy lands Richie can’t see from here. In the space they leave behind there’s endless plains of sand and desert greens in patches, like it used to be a fully green area and when those invisible hands pulled the horizon away from them they pulled the land too taut. Stretch marks where grass doesn’t grow. The sky glows a light pollution grey. Instead of twinkling stars they have this: A towering Chevron gas station sign which Eddie points to— for the seat covers, of course.

“Yo, check it out,” Richie points out the front window as he pulls onto the off-ramp, the little red and white buildings and the flickering signage for the Summit Inn. There’s a Historic Route 66 sticker next to the inn name (barely visible, but you don’t need it to know that this place is old). The sign above their cafe proudly proclaims that they have Date Shakes and Ostrich Burgers. The parking lot is dotted with beat up four-doors and jacked up pick up trucks. 

“Now that, that’s a piece o’ history right there,” Richie says in his Dad voice. Not his dad specifically, but the dad who wears baseball caps with his favourite sports team on them, and says stuff like _i’m hip, i’m down with the kids_. 

“It’s fucking decrepit.” 

“It’s romantic.”

“Oh of course, who wouldn’t be wooed by bed bugs and asbestos?”

To make the obvious mom joke, or to make fun of the fact that Eddie used the word _wooed,_ that is the question. Considering they’re talking about a remnant of the 20s maybe it was an intentional throw back. As he pulls into the gas station Richie says, “Lemme tell ya, your mom sure was wooed by it. In fact, I wooed her all night long, baby.”

Eddie swivels around to face him, hand frozen on the seat belt clip, eyes in a narrowed stare. “You. All night? You wish, Tozier.”

“Better believe it sugar, au naturel too.” He winks and hopes the viagra joke is obvious enough.

Eddie rolls his eyes and swings out of the car. Pulling the keys out of the ignition Richie stumbles out of his own door to start filling up the tank. To Eddie’s retreating back he calls, “I can prove it to you, if you don’t believe me!”

He throws a middle finger back over his shoulder at Richie. Classic.

He passes Eddie in the doorway to the gas station when he’s going in to pay for the full tank of gas. He has the briefest moment of fear where he thinks Eddie might just drive away in the car and leave Richie stranded here— he doesn’t technically need him to get to Ithaca. He doesn’t know if Eddie’s that kind of guy, but probably not. It’s probably fine.

He buys a tube of Pringles, a bag of BBQ Lays, and then a couple HotRods and five hour energy drinks when he gets up to the cash. There’s still half of his pack of Marlboro Reds left, which is usually when he restocks, but then… he’s driving cross country with an asthmatic so maybe he shouldn’t. Or, maybe he’ll have to run out and get some in the middle of the night while they’re sleeping in the car at the back of a truck-stop parking lot or something. Who’s to say.

Eddie’s leaning against the side of the car when Richie gets back, and he doesn’t get in even after Richie’s thrown his plastic bag of road snacks in the back seat and is getting into the driver’s seat himself. The thing is, sometimes the passenger door gets stuck, so Richie sort of blindly reaches across the centre console to open it for him from the inside. A screaming green appears to him from the corner of his eye, and that’s when he realizes why Eddie’s been loitering outside the car instead of sitting comfortably in his seat. 

The seat cover he’s bought is this god awful fish, drawn in what is valiantly attempting to be a hyperrealistic style. Caught in its gaping mouth with a fish hook, it’s being pulled up through the top of the seat. The background is an abstraction of seaweed and blue water and wood planks in a camo assemblage. He’s sort of proud, that Eddie had found something Richie’s actually disgusted by. At the same time, he mourns the loss of his pink cheetah print seat covers. He can feel two whole things at once, he can contain multitudes.

Eddie opens the door without a hitch, and slides back into the car, buckles up all nonchalant, as if he hadn’t been waiting for Richie to see it before he sat down. It’s incredibly unsubtle, the whole charade. He tears at a bag of trail mix with his teeth. Of course, he’s made the sensible choice to buy dried fruits and nuts as a road snack. Disgusting. 

Richie leans back into his seat and turns the key in the ignition. “Alright Daddio, you ready to rumble?” 

Eddie groans, and pelts Richie with an unsalted peanut. What was even the point of cleaning, if Eddie’s just going to throw food around the car. Richie eats the peanut off the floor, and pulls back onto the highway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i dont live in LA or like even close i just spend a truly absurd amount of time street viewing it, so if there are like glaring inaccuracies lemme know! the summit inn did used to be there though but just the sign is left now
> 
> albums mentioned: i am the movie - motion city soundtrack, louder now - taking back sunday, nothing gold can stay - new found glory, lies for the liars - the used, everything in transit - jack's mannequin, page avenue - story of the year, dear diary my teen angst has a body count - from first to last, …is a real boy - say anything, take off your pants and jacket - blink 182
> 
> can't figure out how to link the songs specifically, sorry!


	6. we'd fry our brains and say it's so much fun, out here

They float across the border between California and Arizona in the cold of a desert night. From the speakers, the only thing louder than Eddie’s rhythmic sleeping breaths, Jack’s Mannequin laments the tragedies of California. 

_(And today was a day just like any other)_. 

Richie feels like at some point in the day it should have struck him that he’s doing something monumental, and stupid — and monumentally stupid — but it just doesn’t hit him that he’s doing anything of note. He expected when he properly left LA that it would feel like _something_ , and then when nothing happened he figured the big realization was just on the other side of the California border, like a brick wall for him to drive headfirst into. So far it all just feels like driving, but it’s darker and more peaceful than he’s used to, both inside and outside the car. And he doesn’t even feel like turning the music up to drown out all that silence either, is the thing. 

He does whisper-yell along to the bridge of I’m Ready, though, with just enough enthusiasm that Eddie begins to stir in the passenger seat where’s all curled up against the chill of night that seeped in from outside. Grimacing, Richie turns down the volume on himself, mouthing along to the words silently — as much as it pains him not to give his absolute all in a performance. If Eddie wakes up right now he’ll have to complain about the music, and Richie will have to argue him on it. And he kind of just wants to sit in this, for a bit.

In his sleep Eddie pulls the sleeves of his tee-shirt down over his arms as far as they’ll go. Richie’s not like, doing him any favours (any _more_ favours) _,_ but he turns the car heater on — for maybe the sixth time in his life. He leaves a hand resting on the vent, because it feels like it’s what he should do. He’ll take off his hoodie when he starts sweating in a half hour.

When the vent starts blowing steady warm air into his palm he swipes the middle vents to point at Eddie and drops his hand back to the stick shift. It’s all in vain of course, Eddie wakes up twenty minutes later to switch the heating to a setting Richie doesn’t understand (three dials is two dials too many for him to keep track of), and immediately shuts off Kill The Messenger just as it’s getting to the second verse. 

“Fuck what time is it,” The little clock in Richie’s car says 6:00 PM, because he doesn’t see the point in changing it. Eddie scrubs at his face trying to wake up. “How much longer are we going tonight?”

“You’re the man with the plan Eduardo. Or should I say, anal retentive minute-by-minute itinerary. You tell me.”

Eddie smacks Richie in the arm with the rolled up stack of directions and mutters something about _we’re on a schedule for a fucking reason_. The itinerary’s written alongside the Google directions, in accordance to the time estimates Google had given them for each stretch of the trip. There’s planned piss breaks, and math on how long it should take them to go through a drive through for their meals.

“Ugh, where are we?” He’s flipping through the first few pages, “Are we in Arizona yet?”

“Like, barely. Crossed the border… I don’t know. A bit ago.” 

Eddie cuts him a glare from across the middle console. Richie knows without looking that his eyebrows are saying _how are you not keeping track of where you’re going, what if we run out of gas or puncture a tire and have to call triple A, how are you going to tell them where we are in the middle of the desert_. Richie replies with a shrug and he hopes the message of _my bad_ gets across just as clearly.

“Um,” Eddie fumbles around in the glove compartment in the dark, “shit where’s my phone?” 

Richie clicks on the light above the dashboard and Eddie turns it off immediately.

“Dude.”

“It reduces visibility, it’s fine I can find it,” he pull his little flip phone out of the glove compartment and waves it triumphantly in Richie’s face, “without your help.” 

Richie waves Eddie’s hands away, “Sorry what was that about reduced visibility, Mr. Road Safety? I couldn’t focus on what you were saying over all the hands in my face.”

Eddie ignores him to double check the time on his phone and where that should put them on the itinerary, even though in Richie’s experience Google’s timing is usually off by at least forty minutes. 

“We should be in Kingman in about an hour, the Arizona Inn has pretty good ratings, and it’s cheap.”

“Have you looked up where we’re gonna stay for every night of the trip?” 

Eddie squints at him, “It’s perfectly reasonable and normal to look up places to sleep when you’re travelling.”

“Okay, alright dude. What if that one’s full?” He knows what the answer is, but he wants to hear Eddie say:

“There’s a Motel 6 across the street.” 

“Of course there is.”

While Eddie settles back into his seat to stare out at whatever he can see in the darkness out the passenger side window, Richie reaches back over to the radio. There’s still a couple songs left on the album he was listening to, thank you very much. He turns it up to drown out whatever Eddie grumbles in response to it being back on, and then sings over it, loud and off key when Eddie turns to bitch at him directly to his face. Like twelve year olds stealing the single Xbox controller away from each other in an endless loop — more entertained by the competition over the controller than Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 — Richie and Eddie grapple over the radio controls (with brief respites of fake surrender), swearing at each other and turning the volume up and down in unbearable intervals until the album finishes. 

They reach a compromise of The Fray, which Eddie pulled out of the Atreyu case Richie had kept it hidden in throughout senior year. Look, Richie has an image, but How to Save a Life just _hits_. (He’d only been arguing in favour of Atreyu for the sake of arguing anyway).

* * *

The one thing they don’t argue about for even a second, not even for the fun of it, is getting one room at the motel. Neither of them wants to spend that much money on this trip — not that they have much to be spending anyway. It’s got two beds in it and they’re adults.

Richie leaves Eddie at the motel to book their room, and then drives to a McDonald’s for food. Sitting at the edge of one of the booth seats, waiting for his order to be called, is the first time Richie has a chance to check his phone since they left the city.

**From: Mari Radio Stn 1:30 P.M.**

_where ru ricky said u didnt show_

**From: Mari Radio Stn 2:09 P.M.**

_how drunk were u last night omfg_

**From: Mari Radio Stn 6:34 P.M.**

_im not taking the fall 4 u dude. call ricky_

**From: Mari Radio Stn 7:31 P.M.**

_also call me so i kno ur alive u ass_

Overall, today has been a bad day for checking his inbox folder. He hangs his head and smacks the phone against his forehead, just a little, because he doesn’t know what else to do. Technically he still had two shifts at the station, today and tomorrow, before he was officially done for exams season. He knows he knew about them last night, because he kept reminding himself not to miss work no matter how hungover he was. Mari told him when she “interviewed” him not to, or else she gets in trouble. And then he goes and not only does he skip work, but he leaves the state and abandons her to deal with whatever bullshit Ricky has to say about it. 

**To: Mari Radio Stn 12:10 A.M.**

_im sosososososo sorry ://// cant explain but i promise its not anything ur thinking_

On Richie’s left shoulder sits a devil, that says _this is all Eddie’s fault, he distracted you from the only responsibility you’ve ever felt dedicated to seeing through to the end. And it’s not like it’s you who filmed and sent a lewd video on an outdated form of media to your boring long distance girlfriend. Ditch him, go back home, he can find his own damn way across the country. He’s not even being nice to you and you’re doing him a huge favour._

On his right shoulder sits an angel, who reminds him _it was already two when Eddie woke you up, you would have been late for work with or without him. Mari’s reasonable, she’ll understand that you were helping out a friend, because he is a friend._

Between the two of them sits Richie’s own head and it says _you just wanted to get out of there and this was a convenient excuse to actually do it. Maybe you never would have without Eddie. Maybe he’s doing you the favour._

He just about sprints out the door after he grabs their food from the counter and heads back to the motel. His phone chimes a couple times, but (for the first time in his life) he’s being a responsible driver and doesn’t check them.

Eddie calls as Richie pulls up to the motel like he’s psychic.

“Waazzuuuuup.” 

It takes Eddie a second to answer because he’s busy regretting some key life choices. Richie can hear it from the depth of the sigh that crackles over the line.

Finally, he says, “You left to get food forty minutes ago. I figured you were dead in a ditch by now.”

“Aw, and you called to check up on me? Because you were worried? That’s so sweet Eds, I’m touched.”

“I knew you weren’t dead, I’m not that lucky.”

“Actually, I’m hurt, you hurt me Eds.”

“We’re in room twelve.” 

It’s on the second floor and Eddie takes a long time letting Richie in when he knocks. Richie can hear him pulling the chain off the door agonizingly slow. It’s like he _wants_ cold food. 

Richie chucks the bag with Eddie’s food in it on the desk in the corner. Then he tosses himself with his own bag on the bed closest to the wall, lands face down with his shoes still half on. Kicking them off mid flight didn’t work the way he thought it would. 

Eddie blinks at him, “Uh, I was gon…”

Richie kicks his feet against the side of the bed to dislodge the slip on vans from where they’re hooked onto his toes.

“Sorry, did you want this bed?” Once his shoes have thunked onto the floor, Richie shuffles up the bed using all his limbs (to excess), and in all his restlessness knocks a couple fries loose from the bag, “You can still have it dude, grab that grub ’n’ hop on up here. We’ll have family dinner before bed.” 

Eddie’s shoulders heave with his sigh, but he grabs the food off the desk and comes over to the bed. Richie pulls out both of his junior chickens and rips the paper bag open a little to get at the large fries in there easier.

Out of his own bag, Eddie pulls out the McNugget Happy Meal™ Richie bought him. 

“What the fuck?”

“You wanted chicken nuggets right?”

Eddie looks at him incredulously.

“I got the one with the milk instead of the orange juice, it’s important for little boys to get their calcium so that they grow big and strong.”

“Is this a fucking height joke?”

“A joke? Eddie I’m just looking out for you, trying to take care of your health. And your on road entertainment. It comes with a toy!”

“I know it fucking— you’re such a dick.” He rips into the red box and glares at the contents, lips pressed into a thin line. A box of four chicken nuggets, a tiny plastic bag with browning apple slices, a McDonald’s branded COLD & YUMMY bottle of milk, a tiny yogurt tube and a ranch dip. 

Richie nods sagely, “I’ve been told that is my name…” even though no one calls him Dick (thank god).

Eddie reaches over and grabs Richie’s paper bag full of fries and drags it over to himself, doesn’t seem to notice or care about the couple that spill out and leave little salty grease stains on the bright white comforter. 

“You don’t need this, do you? Two burgers is enough for a full grown boy such as yourself, right?”

“Wha—?” Richie swipes for the bag of fries.

“I’m still growing, I need all the food I can get right?” He shoves a couple fries into his mouth, “Aren’t you looking out for my health and shit?” 

Richie cackles with glee. Half from the image of Eddie truly as a child, stealing food from people under the guise of _aren’t you looking out for my health and shit?_ and half because Eddie just makes him laugh, inexplicably and unpredictably. 

Richie raises his hands in faux surrender and leans back against the headboard. Eddie’s messier when he eats than Richie had expected. Between bites of his chicken nuggets he swipes his fries through huge globs of ketchup, and shovels them into his mouth in groups of four or five. The fact that he even eats fast food at all is sort of surprising. 

“Didn’t think you were a McDonald’s kind of guy.”

Eddie furrows his eyebrows. “What do you mean?” He says, through a full mouth of food.

“There’s like, negative nutritional value in this shit and you bought like, nuts and dried fruit at the gas station. Just…” He tips his hands like a scale, trying to ask where Eddie fits between the two. 

Eddie tilts his head at him, considering. He swallows and wipes across his mouth with the back of his hand before he talks again. “I’m just hungry dude. I don’t usually eat like this, I guess.”

“Cool, okay. Just curious.” Because he is generally curious about Eddie, in a background way. Not necessarily his eating habits, just in where he deviates from the person who wears polos exclusively, carries around half a pharmacy in his cargo shorts and hates all things fun. Re: The person he ran into with his skateboard four months ago. Incidentally, Eddie deviates from the image of him that Richie built up in his own head in more ways than he adheres to it.

Eddie’s still looking at him in that same considering way. Richie doesn’t know what to do with it so he squishes the rest of his first junior chicken into his mouth, making two bites into one. Nervously, Eddie wipes his hands on the comforter next to himself. 

“Myra likes eating healthy. She’s doing the Atkins diet and I’m… I don’t know, doing it with her.”

The twelve year old that permanently lives in Richie’s head laughs a little at _doing it with her_ and tries to prod Richie into making a shitty joke about it. Blessedly his mouth is full of soggy white bread and chicken. 

Eddie continues, unaware of Richie’s internal dilemma. “But my mom really likes packaged food so I eat a lot of that too. Or I did, when I was little.”

Richie considers this while Eddie reaches for more fries. 

“And what do you like?”

Eddie falters a little, where he’s dipping his handful of fries into the gloop of ketchup in the top of the chicken nugget box. He shrugs, “It’s just food.”

“Yeah okay, but. Like, gun to your head, what would you say your favourite food is?”

“Why would someone ask me that at gunpoint?”

“Have you not seen Criminal Minds? The weirdest shit sets people off.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, “So there’s a right answer to this? Like, he won’t kill me if I say a food he likes?”

“No like, the point is that he… cares about your opinions, or something I don’t—” His mouth won’t stop moving but his hands shove the junior chicken up at his mouth to stop him from using it to say more words.

“Okay…” Eddie pulls the bag of little apples out of the Happy Meal box, tears at it with his teeth to get it open. “My friend Mike makes really good pancakes.”

“Is that your final answer? Mike’s Rootin’ Tootin’ Homemade Pancakes?”

“Yeah, why? Is there a problem with that? Is it not the right answer?”

“There’s no right or wrong answer, dude.”

Eddie nods at him, and then crunches on what Richie knows is a deeply unsatisfying apple. Bravely and stubbornly he finishes the whole tiny slice of powdery fruit before neatly wrapping the rest up in the plastic they came in, and throwing that in the paper bag, which he’s deemed the garbage. Along with the apples he throws in the untouched ranch dressing and the crumpled and ketchup-soggy box of chicken nuggets. He gets up with the bag of garbage and the Happy Meal box. “I’m gonna start getting ready, we have to be up early.”

Richie nods and starts to pick up his own trash, “For sure, I’ll get off your bed.”

“Huh? Oh, no it’s fine. I’ll sleep on the other one.” 

“You sure?” In his hands Richie’s crumpling up the used wrappers from his JCs to toss into the garbage can in the opposite corner of the room.

Eddie looks at the comforter and nods. “I’m sure.” He drops the box onto the desk, dumps the paper bag in the trash unceremoniously and then he goes to root through his bag for his bathroom stuff. 

Belatedly Richie glances at what Eddie had been looking at before he walked away. The comforter where he was sitting is covered in grease and salt and tiny beige crumbs from dropped fries, and smears from where Eddie had wiped his hands against the comforter (Richie’s thinking he wasn’t nervous when he did that so much as he was malicious). There’s two small ketchup stains, not yet dry but not something he’s be able to clean off either. 

Richie sits crosslegged on top of the dirty comforter, tilts his head back and looks up toward the ceiling as if exasperated, but he can’t not smile. Either way Eddie can't see, who is there to perform for, other than himself?

He gets under the sheets anyway, jeans and all, makes a big show of getting comfortable on his side, snuggled up in the thousands of pillows at the head of the bed. 

“I know I shouldn’t be surprised but, are you not gonna brush your teeth?”

Richie curls deeper into his clean pillows. “No. So comfy.”

“Alright, it’s your teeth that are gonna rot out of your skull, not mine.”

“Mhmm. But I’m so sleepy and so comfy, and you’re still out there in the cold, standing. Awake. Sucks to be you, goodnight.” 

The door to the washroom clicks before Richie’s actually done talking but he swears he can hear a little chuckle echo through the wall between them. 

He remembers belatedly that he should check his texts to see what Mari answered, and palms the phone off the bedside table where he’d dropped it face down earlier. 

**From: Mari Radio Stn 12:14 A.M.**

_someone_ _accidentally send their long distance gf a sex tape & now they have 2 beat it there before she sees?_

**To: Mari Radio Stn 12:40 A.M.**

_what_

**From: Mari Radio Stn 12:40 A.M.**

_i get it. it happens_

**To: Mari Radio Stn 12:40 A.M.**

_wt f do u mean it happens who has this happened 2 howd u kno_

Mari never answers and Richie falls asleep confused, with all the lights still on. Through the grace of god alone he remembers to take out his contacts.

* * *

Eddie wakes Richie up, for the second time in as many days, at an ungodly hour. And not gently. Richie’s own dirty shoe comes sailing through the air straight for his pillow. 

“We have to leave in twenty minutes, get up.”

Without his glasses or contacts Richie squints across the room trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. From what he can tell, and that’s not much, Eddie’s not out of bed either, but he did lean almost full off the bed to grab one of Richie’s shoes to use it as a projectile. The little fuck. 

“Time’s it?” 

“Seven.” 

Richie buries his head in his pillow and groans. “You’re evil.”

“Stop bitching, you’re not even driving.”

“Exactly, so let me sleep.”

“I will leave you here.” 

“Yeah, you’d have to get out of bed first to leave me here.” 

“Fuck you.”

Richie hears the rustling of Eddie getting out of bed and pulling the comforter back up, smoothing it over so it looks almost un-slept-in. 

“Can you pass me my glasses, I can’t see shit.”

“Where are they?”

“Backpack,” Richie waves his hand unhelpfully around the whole room. He doesn’t remember where he left it. “In the front pocket.”

While Eddie looks for his bag, and then looks through the bag for his glasses (not in the front pocket, apparently) Richie sits up and smooths his hair down as much as he can without looking at it. He straightened it yesterday, but he knows parts of it will have curled atrociously over night. He doesn’t really want to think about it until he has the straightener plugged in and burning at two hundred degrees. Or however hot it is that straighteners go. 

He stretches an arm out for the case when the Eddie blur moves toward him, and despite the assault with his shoe from this morning he places the glasses case in Richie’s hand gently, like a normal person, and not a gremlin. 

Richie smiles at him, “Thanks man.” 

“Get ready,” Eddie disappears into the bathroom just as he had appeared — blurrily. 

Richie shoves his glasses on and stumbles around the room tugging on a fresh pair of jeans and and a checkered zip up over the shirt he slept in last night. He pulls the sleeves down so they fit his thumb in the little thumb-hole. Eddie is somehow still in the bathroom. That’s fine, Richie can straighten his hair in the mirror above the desk. He reaches into his bag for it, but he keeps pulling out unrelated stuff. A toothbrush, razor, a lump of fresh socks and underwear, a bright green Invader Zim shirt, contact solution. No straightener anywhere. Did he leave it in the car? Did Eddie take it? His hair isn’t even straight…

Richie squints at himself in the mirror and tries to remember if he packed it. He can’t believe he would have forgotten it, what kind of idiot is he? He texts Stan _did we pack mi straightener yesterday_ but it’s not even eight in the morning. Stan’s not answering him. 

That’s how Eddie finds him (when he finally leaves the bathroom), squinting at his own reflection next to his turned out backpack. 

“How did you make a bigger mess than I left you in?”

Richie flips his hood up over the nightmare that is his hair and starts shoving everything back into his backpack. “I forgot my fucking straightener, so you’re not allowed to say anything about my hair.”

“Richie I can’t stress this enough, I don’t care about your emo fringe.” 

It’s strangely comforting to hear. Even though on principle he’s kind of offended. He still pulls his hoodie further down over his face. 

Eddie’s watching him from the doorway, duffle bag slung over his shoulder. “I’m ready, you got everything? Can we leave?” He looks at his closed phone impatiently. Richie’s certain they’re exactly four minutes behind schedule and Eddie’s about to have an aneurism over it.

“Yeah, I think,” He grabs his barely closed backpack and sweeps a final look over everywhere he’s been in the room, the bed, the nightstand. He grabs the room keys off the desk, next to the Happy Meal box— “Wait, wait, we didn’t see what toy you got!”

Eddie cuts him an exasperated look, and then an evil glare at the offending Happy Meal, but seems to realize it’s quicker to just do it than to argue, because he marches over and reaches in to the box, without much patience. “Don’t you usually ask for the one you want anyway?”

“I think that’s a privilege reserved only for children.” 

Eddie pulls out a figurine that is genuinely upsetting, both in that its expression instantly makes Richie feel sad along with it, and also in that it’s terrifying anatomically. Eddie’s looking at it with unbridled disgust. 

The toy that emerges from the plastic wrapping when Eddie reluctantly tears it apart, is a koala Lady of Liberty — or what could have been a koala if literally any effort had been put into it. It’s looking down in despair, with its little eyes painted the same grey as its fur. One arm is up holding the torch, but the other arm, instead of holding the book, is curled impossibly around its back, gripping the back of its own head.

“It’s a monster, Richie.”

“Yeah but,” He lays a gentle hand on Eddie’s shoulder, “It’s our monster Eds. We’re parents.” 

“Well I don’t know how to break this to you, but I’m gonna throw out our child.”

Richie gasps and rips the toy away from Eddie, clutching it to his chest with both arms. “Don’t you dare!”

“Well what the fuck am I supposed to do with it?”

“It? It? You call our sweet baby boy an it, Edward? What kind of father are you?” Despite the fact that Richie also is reluctant to call this ungodly creation anything at all, let alone anything that would imply sentience.

“Don’t put this all on me Richard, I didn’t ask for the fucking Happy Meal did I? If you want the toy so bad then you keep it.”

“Oh, so now you’re abandoning me with our newborn?” Richie scoffs and turns away from Eddie, koala lost somewhere in the folds of his hoodie though he keeps his arms folded around his chest like he knows where it is. “You’re not the man I thought you were.” 

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

Richie sighs. “Hey, have you noticed… ever since we got the koala we’ve been fighting a lot more?” When he looks up to pout at Eddie he sees he’s already moved back to the door, one hand on the knob.

Eddie glares at Richie, and Richie sees his jaw bone shift under the pressure with which he’s grinding his teeth, but against his best efforts Eddie’s face splits around a grin. He buries the following laugh into his hands, under the guise of exasperation. Richie watches his shoulders shake with restrained laughter while he absentmindedly fishes the koala demon out the black hole of his hoodie. 

“Fine, we can keep the koala but can we just go already?”

Richie kisses the forehead of the toy and shoves it into his front pocket. He marches right past Eddie, through the doorway and out in the the hall.

“Andale Eduardo, what the fuck are we waiting for.”

He leaves Eddie to check them out and takes their stuff out to the car, so that he can curl up in the passenger seat as soon as possible and hopefully be fully zonked out within the next seven seconds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been so long since ive sat down to write this that i dont remember like anything that's happened so this was a nightmare to write and nothing even happens in it! anyway promise there's plot in the next one!! 
> 
> (and today was a day just like any other) is the opening line of I'm Ready, the song that Richie's listening to at the beginning, for whoever doesn't have early 2000s emo lyrics on like immediate recall! the title is also jack's mannequin - holiday from real
> 
> https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-86P5odYf2k/maxresdefault.jpg this is the toy mentioned btw (the rest are also eldritch horrors)
> 
> love every one of u who reads this like for real for real, there r so many words.. you're all heroes thank u


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